26 Lady Butler, the soldiers’ painter Piers Butler
29 Lament for the cash collection box Liz Hodgkinson
31 On tour with the Rolling Stones Christopher Simon Sykes
36 RIP Body Odour
Candida Crewe
Regulars
5 The Old Un’s Notes
9 Gyles Brandreth’s Diary
10 Grumpy Oldie Man
Matthew Norman
13 Olden Life: Who were Charters and Caldicott? Harry Cluff
13 Modern Life: What is Skibidi Toilet? Richard Godwin
34 Mary Killen’s Beauty Tips
37 Prue’s News Prue Leith
38 Town Mouse
Tom Hodgkinson
39 Country Mouse Giles Wood
40 Postcards from the Edge Mary Kenny
43 Small World Jem Clarke
45 History David Horspool
46 Oldie Man of Letters A N Wilson
48 God Sister Teresa
48 Memorial Service: Marianne Faithfull James Hughes-Onslow
49 The Doctor’s Surgery Dr Theodore Dalrymple
51 I Once Met … Eric Morecambe David Blundell
51 Memory Lane
Anne Carey
52 Readers’ Letters
65 Commonplace Corner
65 Rant: Stripping actors Jason Morrell
89 Crossword
91 Bridge Andrew Robson
91 Competition Tessa Castro
98 Ask Virginia Ironside Books
54 Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark, by Frances Wilson Robin Baird-Smith
55 Is a River Alive?, by Robert Macfarlane
Patrick Barkham
57 Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed
Sub-editor
Art
Supplements
Editorial
Publisher
Patron
Our
America, by Sam Tanenhaus
Christopher Sandford
57 The Buried City: Unearthing the Real Pompeii, by Gabriel Zuchtriegel John Davie
59 London Clubland: A Companion for the Curious, by Seth Alexander Thévoz Thomas W Hodgkinson
61 Sceptred Isle: A New History of the Fourteenth Century, by Helen Carr Claudia Gold
63 Parallel Lines, by Edward St Aubyn Jasper Rees
Arts
66 Film: Riefenstahl
Harry Mount
67 Theatre: Romeo and Juliet
William Cook
68 Radio
Valerie Grove
68 Television Frances Wilson
69 Music
Richard Osborne
70 Golden Oldies
Mark Ellen
71 Exhibitions
Huon Mallalieu
Pursuits
73 Gardening
David Wheeler
73 Kitchen Garden
Simon Courtauld
74 Cookery
Elisabeth Luard
74 Restaurants
James Pembroke
75 Drink Bill Knott
76 Sport Jim White
76 Motoring
Alan Judd
78 Digital Life
Matthew Webster
78 Money Matters
Neil Collins
81 Bird of the Month: Longeared owl John McEwen
Travel
82 My Mafia pilgrimage in Calabria James Pembroke
84 Overlooked Britain: Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute Lucinda Lambton
87 On the Road: Robert Bathurst Louise Flind
93 Dad’s last walk in Norfolk
Patrick Barkham
Reader Offers
Mary Killen on plump lips page 34
Latin lover: Martin Scorsese page 20
The Old Un’s Notes
The Old Un salutes the great Tony Curtis (1925-2010), who would have celebrated his 100th birthday on 3rd June.
If you were to distil his life into numbers, it might be: 109 films, lovers (by his estimation) ‘in the four figures’, six wives, and countless aphorisms about Hollywood.
The most notorious was the comment Curtis made about his lingering embrace of Marilyn Monroe in 1959’s Some Like It Hot. ‘It was like kissing Hitler,’ he remarked.
British fans will remember Curtis for his co-starring role with Roger Moore in the action comedy series The Persuaders!, which aired over the winter of 1971-72.
The premise was simple: two bored playboys jet around the world solving crimes while courting an unfeasible number of glamorous women with big hair. It was camp, silly and thoroughly enjoyable and could have been made only in the seventies.
Roger Moore once told The Old Un that he ‘loved’ the show, although getting to know Curtis had been a challenge: ‘I went to Tony’s house in Hollywood. He was a spokesman for the US anti-smoking lobby, and I’d been told that I wasn’t to light up. After sitting there for an hour, I said, “Do you mind if I have a cigarette?”
‘Tony opened every window in the room, turned on an industrial-size fan in my
Among this month’s contributors
Griff Rhys Jones (p19) starred in Alas Smith and Jones with Mel Smith. He was in Not the Nine O’Clock News. Talkback, his company, produced Da Ali G Show and I’m Alan Partridge.
Dr Jonathan Katz (p20) is Oxford’s Public Orator, responsible for the university’s Latin orations. He’s a Fellow at Brasenose and an All Souls Quondam Fellow. He was Head of Classics at Westminster School.
Hope Coke (p22) was Social Media Editor and a news and features writer at Tatler. She has written for Air Mail and the Telegraph. In this issue, she writes about Anthony Powell, her great-grandfather.
Christopher Simon Sykes (p31) is a writer and photographer. He wrote Hockney: the Biography and The Big House. With Hugh Massingberd, he published Great Houses of England.
face, and dropped a book on the horrors of lung cancer on my lap. I quit smoking the next day.’
Ironically, when Curtis arrived at Heathrow to start filming The Persuaders!, he was arrested for carrying marijuana in his luggage.
Curtis worked steadily into his seventies, even if the films were often mediocre. Lobster Man from Mars (1989) was a satire on bad movies that actually was a bad movie.
Still, set against that were his roles in the likes of Trapeze (1956) and Sweet Smell of Success (1957). The latter provided him another of his great quotes. ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,’ Curtis ad-libs to a courting couple. ‘That gives you a lot of leeway.’
‘I’m looking for something inflatable’
As 133 cardinals voted in Pope Leo XIV, it’s time to remember the 318 bishops who gathered together in Nicaea (now Iznik, Turkey) 1,700 years ago.
A special service at Temple Church has just marked the 1,700th anniversary of
Kings of Cool: Tony Curtis and Roger Moore in The Persuaders!
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the opening day of the Council of Nicaea on 20 May in 325 AD.
At the Council, the bishops agreed on the Nicene Creed, still the statement of faith that unites Christians:
‘We believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of all things visible and invisible; And in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the Son of God, begotten from the Father, only-begotten, that is, from the substance of the Father, God from God, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one substance with the Father...’
That last line, in bold above, was crucial. The creed declared that the Son was homoousious – of the same substance – with the Father. It ended the suggestion that the Son was homoiousios – of a similar substance with the Father. The difference between the words was a single i – or iota, the Greek letter. Thus the expression, ‘one iota of difference’.
The Council of Nicaea also established the date of Easter. All in all, one of the most significant gatherings in history.
Also at the Temple Church recently, a Every Tuesday, you can find the latest weekly interview by Harry Mount or Charlotte Metcalf with some of our Oldie friends, such as Stephen Fry, Craig Brown and A N Wilson. And we release three more podcasts on Top of the Pods, our selection of the best podcasts and comedy clips on the internet. Just sign up for the newsletter on the homepage of the website. Sign up to our weekly e-newsletter
‘They evolve so fast!’
scrum of largely right-leaning Anglicans were obliged to stand through a commendation of the European Union.
The event was the launch of Bijan Omrani’s non-fiction book God Is an Englishman. The Rev Robin Griffith-Jones, ‘Reverend and Valiant Master of the Temple’, gave a speech praising the creators of the EU, among them Robert Schuman, for what he felt was their avowedly Roman Catholic project.
Griffith-Jones (b 1956) wondered if Omrani’s next book should be God Is a Eurocrat – at which some Brexiteers in the audience nearly did the nose trick on their white wine.
Griffith-Jones, who once worked at Christie’s, has perhaps the most orotund
voice in the C of E. It is a remarkable instrument, as fruity as Donald Sinden’s, boomy as Brian Blessed’s, deep as Hannah Arendt’s.
BBC Radio should hire him for the Shipping Forecast, or maybe to read some rap verses for Book at Bedtime
A book about gentlemen’s clubland, reviewed in this issue, has unearthed the song of Pall Mall’s Reform club.
Seth Thévoz, author of London Clubland: A Companion for the Curious, credits two Reform members for sharing the gem with him.
Sung to the tune of ‘Auld Lang Syne’, it is a four-verse paean to the Reform Bill of 1832 and starts with the lines, ‘We, sons of proud Britannia! Meet/On this auspicious day.’
Given that the Reform now admits women, that genderspecific opening may explain why it is now seldom crooned in the bar after dinner by the establishment worthies and quangocrats who make up the Reform’s membership.
Thévoz’s book also reproduces the National Liberal Club’s song. Sung to ‘Marching Through Georgia’, it claims the Almighty as a Lib Dem.
The opening lines? ‘Sound a blast for Freedom, boys, and send it far and wide! March along to victory, for God is on our side!’
Room for one: Gianni Agnelli, Ferrari chief. His 1966 Ferrari 365 P Berlinetta had a special, central seat. From Peter Grimsdale’s Superveloce: How Italian Cars Conquered the World
Lord Etherton, the former Master of the Rolls who has died, was not only an ‘openly gay exOlympic fencer’, as the Daily Mail once described him, but also a rather shy chap.
His maiden speech in the House of Lords consisted of just three paragraphs, possibly a record. It was a time-limited March 2021 debate on Covid, and speeches were limited to two minutes.
Etherton was treated munificently and was given … drum roll … a whole minute more than other peers.
Modest chap, he did not use the full allocation, taking only two minutes and 53 seconds to complete his minor classic. It is a pity more parliamentarians are not that concise.
The 85th anniversary of Winston Churchill’s becoming Prime Minister was celebrated at the launch of a new gathering, the Beaverbrook Forum.
Churchill’s surprise appointment, on 14th May 1940, was the Minister of Aircraft Production, Canadian press baron Max Beaverbrook (1879-1964).
Winston and Max were old friends, the only politicians to have served in the War Cabinets of both World Wars.
‘We would have lost the First World War if Beaverbrook had not brought Asquith down. And we would have lost the Second World War if Beaverbrook had not got the Spitfires up,’ declared
Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) marries in Savoca, Sicily
Beaverbook’s great-nephew the Rev Jonathan Aitken.
Other speakers included Randolph Churchill (Churchill’s great-grandson) and Max Aitken, Beaverbrook’s great-grandson and heir to the peerage.
Also there were Oldie contributors Lady Antonia Fraser and Quentin Letts, along with the former Chancellor of the Exchequer Norman Lamont and Diane Abbott MP.
She was a reminder that Beaverbook invited leftwingers to his parties, among them Michael Foot and Nye Bevan. He called them the Bollinger Bolsheviks.
In this issue, James Pembroke visits
Calabria in search of the Mob. And here’s another offer you can’t refuse – a tour of Sicily in the footsteps of the Corleone Mafia clan.
In The Godfather Lover’s Guide to Sicily, Karen M Spence take you to the spots where Francis Ford Coppola filmed his epic series.
Locations include Savoca (pictured), where Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) gets married to his Sicilian bride, Apollonia Vitelli, the local bar-owner’s daughter.
Vino bianco is now available at Bar Vitelli, named after its role in the film.
The 5th-century-BC Temple of Segesta also pops up briefly in The Godfather Part III – when the returning Corleones tour the old country in a three-car convoy.
One place not on the agenda is the actual town of Corleone, which gave the clan their name. Originally called Andolini, they are wrongly called Corleone by an immigration official when they land at Ellis Island.
Coppola couldn’t film in Corleone because the city had become too modern –and too dangerous, courtesy of the Cosa Nostra.
A Bristol Cathedral lay clerk, Tim Popple, has revealed the moraleboosting malapropisms
inserted by choirs into well-known hymns.
In his book, Evensong: Notes from the Choir, Popple discloses that Good King Wenceslas’s ‘deep and crisp and even’ becomes a pizza’s ‘deep pan, crisp and even’.
In ‘Lo he comes, with clouds descending’, the phrase ‘deeply wailing’ turns into ‘deep-sea whaling’.
And the first verse of one hymn becomes ‘On Jordan’s bank, the Baptists cry./ If I were Baptist, so would I./ They do not drink; they have no fun./ I’m glad I am an Anglican.’
P G Wodehouse’s Plum Lines
To salute the 50th anniversary of P G Wodehouse’s death in 1975, at the age of 93, The Oldie remembers his great quotes.
‘He was a bird built rather on the lines of the Albert Hall, round in the middle and not much above.’ Thank You, Jeeves (1934)
Rattigan’s name in lights – for ever
Should a London theatre be named after the great
‘But the world is a dark enough place for even a little flicker to be welcome.’
That’s a great line from a great play –Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea – currently playing at one of London’s great theatres (possibly the greatest), the Theatre Royal, Haymarket.
The theatre is in my good books at the moment. It’s the first to sign up to a campaign I have launched. This might seem trivial to you – but, if successful, it will make a lasting difference to theatrelovers and future theatre historians.
As a rule, since they were introduced 200 or so years ago, playbills and theatre posters advertising a show have featured the month and the day of the show’s opening, but not the year. This means you can’t date a production from its poster.
When you next go to a theatre where they have posters of past triumphs framed on the walls, check them out and you will see what I mean.
By the bar at the London Palladium at Christmas, I saw a glorious poster for an old Aladdin. Top of the bill were Cilla Black and Leslie Crowther. Alfred Marks and Terry Scott were in it, too. ‘Twice Daily, 2.45 and 7.30,’ says the poster. ‘Opening December 22nd.’
But it does not give the year. Maddening. I’m going to change all that.
I went to see The Deep Blue Sea because my friend Selina Cadell is in it – and wonderful. You will know her: she’s the one who wears the neck brace in Doc Martin.
I went also because I love Rattigan’s work. I once played the boy in The Browning Version and I have directed Harlequinade. And I am sort of supporting another campaign that’s just got going: to get a London theatre named after Rattigan.
I say ‘sort of’ because, while Terence Rattigan is undoubtedly one of the English ‘greats’, wearing my
amateur-theatre-historian hat I find it quite annoying when theatres keep changing their names. You don’t know where you are. The Noël Coward used to be the Albery. Before that, it was the New Theatre.
I have real reservations about the Harold Pinter, which used to be the Comedy. If the theatre’s called the Pinter, it makes you think twice before you book.
London’s theatreland has a Shaw and a Sondheim and an Ivor Novello, but why not a Sheridan or a Wilde or even a Ray Cooney?
I remember passing a row of unsightly dustbins by the stage door of the National Theatre a few years ago.
‘Yes,’ said the great Sir Donald Sinden who was with me, ‘they’re planning the Samuel Beckett Studio.’
I need to lose weight. I must get into my morning-suit trousers for Royal Ascot.
Last year, I spent a humiliating day in the Royal Enclosure, unable to study the race card, unable to follow the form, because my left hand was permanently engaged trying to keep my trousers up while my right hand was busy pulling down my waistcoat to hide my exposed midriff.
I need to lose three inches round the waist. I am getting help at Auriens
playwright?
Chelsea, and their health guru Gideon has given me some dietary tips: increase protein intake; incorporate colourful, antioxidant-rich plant food at each meal; swap some saturated fats (I’m a glutton for cheese!) for omega-3 fatty acids (include sources like oily fish and chia seeds); prioritise carbs earlier in the day, at breakfast and lunch, rather than the evening.
I am just sharing because it seems to be working. To date I have lost 4lb. What I really need is a live-in nutritionist-cum-housekeeper to look after me.
The other day, I was with Chris Patten (Lord Patten of Barnes, KG, CH, late of Oxford University and Hong Kong). He was telling me about the day when, in the late 1960s, as a youngster working in the Conservative Research Department, he was sent, with Ronald Millar (playwright and later noted speechwriter to Margaret Thatcher) to help the then Leader of the Opposition, Ted Heath, with a speech.
Patten and Millar were up early, working on a first draft. They’d had no breakfast when they arrived at Heath’s flat at Albany at 10am, as appointed. They waited for the great man to appear, hoping there might be tea or coffee (and even a biscuit) on offer. There wasn’t.
Heath duly arrived. He remembered the theme of the speech: ‘It’s Care and Compassion, isn’t it?’
They set to work. Three hours later, they were still at it. One o’clock struck and into the room came Ted Heath’s housekeeper, bearing a silver tray, with a bottle of Chablis and a lobster salad. Their eyes came out on stalks. ‘You must be hungry, boys,’ chuckled Ted, not offering them anything as he cheerfully tucked in.
Gyles’s podcast, Rosebud, is out now
Tamsin Greig in The Deep Blue Sea
Grumpy Oldie Man
Our motto? What a bleedin’ family
My latest disaster – the discovery of a long-lost cousin matthew norman
Of the phrases routinely uttered by gentiles that cause a Jewish head to oscillate in bewilderment, the most incomprehensibly goyish is ‘Ah well, at least it can’t get any worse.’
How can people talk like that? Have they failed to comprehend that Fate isn’t one to ignore a hubristic challenge? Hang your metaphorical gonads out to her, as the Greek tragedians appreciated, and it’s a dead cert that, within a day or two, Fate’s boot will administer a ferocious rebuke to those rashly exposed little orbs.
Whatever specific ‘it’ it might be, in other words, it can always get worse, and it invariably does.
What brought this witlessly obvious reflection to mind was a finding shared by my first cousin Dominic.
Dom has a passion for genealogy, and it was as chronicler of family history that he came upon and communicated this news.
Before we come to that, and passing over detail that might betray confidences, let this be stated. While I wouldn’t claim that ours is the worst family ever, it has to be among the worst families yet.
The mantra here is taken from the Steptoe and Son episode in which the totters attend the funeral of one of Albert’s many siblings.
Harold is finding the wake predictably gruesome (various Steptoes pricing up the deceased’s porcelain, preparatory to nicking it; old women screaming at one another over wartime promiscuity with Canadian airmen) until he comes upon a distant young cousin he fancies very much.
He chats her up and looks to have every chance of a result – when his dad issues a warning.
‘I wouldn’t go there if I were you,’ the dirty old man tells Harold. ‘About nine months before she was born, when her father was away fighting, I went round to comfort her lonely mother and…’
Harold takes in a panoramic vista of the chamber of horrors, until his mouth drops open and, with wide-eyed anguish, he rasps, ‘What a bleedin’ family.’
In the unlikely event that our clan is awarded a crest, that will be our heraldic motto. Seldom does a week pass without news of some fresh nightmare obliging my son Louis and me to purse the lips, nod with doleful resignation, and in unison mutter, ‘What a bleedin’ family.’
Again skirting over the detail, let it be known that a recent familial occurrence hoisted the bar to such a level that we did at least raise the imbecility outlined at the start of this piece.
After the synchronised ‘What a bleedin’ family’, one of us observed, ‘I would say it can’t get worse…’, thereby allowing the other to complete the thought with ‘…but of course it can. And of course it will.’
And of course it did. Within 24 hours, a text message pinged in from Dom. ‘I have alarming news, coz…’ it began, above a screenshot lifted from a genealogical website.
In no way was he exaggerating.
‘Simon Cowell,’ read the headline, ‘is Dominic Cooke’s first cousin thrice removed’s husband’s first cousin twice removed.’
Below this pulverising statement, he appended a bit of the family tree unveiling how Mr Cowell comes to be so incredibly closely related to us both, via our shared grandmother, Sadie (known as Suds, and a gold medallist in the Imaginary Bunion discipline at the Hypochondria Olympics of 1936).
Seldom does a week pass without news of some fresh nightmare
I suggested to Dom that a course of family therapy was required.
A theatrical type by trade, if not by temperament, Dom raised the bar. ‘Removal of eyes à la Oedipus,’ he replied, ‘might be necessary.’
Now it may be technically true that others have unearthed even more embarrassing family ties.
All over South America, for instance, scores of Bolivians, Argentines and Paraguayans will have found out down the decades that, far from being a gaucho sweeping across the Pampas in the early 1940s, Grandpa Klaus was pursuing another career thousands of miles away in which neither cattle nor equestrianism played a part.
And clearly it came as a brutal blow to that above-mentioned Greek mythic figure when he discovered the truth about his missus, Jocasta.
Not that he didn’t ask for it. ‘Ah, well,’ as the Loeb translation from the Sophocles original has him observe on realising that the guy he slew at the crossroads was his dad, ‘at least it can’t get any worse.’
But, however mortifying the realisation that your amazing, amazing journey ended in a marriage bed with your old mummy, this is more so.
Say what you will about Oedipus, he was never friends with Sir Philip Green. And, for all their failings, the Nazis didn’t wear their Hugo Boss trousers up to their nipples, or dump tonnes of luminously talentless Celine Dion wannabes on a traumatised nation.
How we will collectively cope with this latest blow is anyone’s guess, but two things are abundantly clear.
The recovery process will not involve a family reunion around the karaoke machine with Cousin Si.
And, somehow, hard as this is to compute, and without my having the first clue how, it will get worse.
who were Charters and Caldicott?
Charters and Caldicott, the inseparable, cricket-obsessed comic duo, began their on-screen lives as supporting characters in Hitchcock’s masterpiece The Lady Vanishes (1938).
The pair, played by charming Basil Radford (1897-1952) and Naunton Wayne (1901-70), endeared themselves to audiences immediately. Calls for them to be written into new scripts for films and plays grew louder and louder.
After 57 performances on the London stage in a play, Giving Away the Bride (1939), their next billing was in Carol Reed’s Night Train to Munich (1940), starring Rex Harrison.
They next appeared in the comedy spy thriller Crook’s Tour (1940), and a jolly bit-part in Millions Like Us (1943).
Their popularity with wartime audiences increased with every appearance. Wayne and Radford demanded larger roles and more money from the creators of their characters, Sidney Gilliat and Frank Launder.
Caldicott (Naunton Wayne) and Charters (Basil Radford), The Lady Vanishes (1938)
Gilliat and Launder refused. When a settlement failed to materialise, their contracts were terminated, ending the happy run of Charters and Caldicott.
Still, Radford and Wayne were now indistinguishable from their characters. So they were then cast in features under alternative names: Paratt and Potter; Prendergast and Fotheringham; Garnet and Leslie. For their second starring roles in a feature film, It’s Not Cricket (1949), they were christened Bright and Early. Their inimitable presence invariably improved unremarkable screenplays and
what is Skibidi Toilet?
Skibidi Toilet is a crudely animated online video series where disembodied human heads burst from toilets saying the word ‘skibidi’. The skibidi toilets wage war against figures with CCTV cameras for faces.
It is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. The humour is rudimentary. The animation is basic. It might as well be made by AI.
And so it is immensely popular with young children who delight in its low-grade inanity. Its creator, a Georgian man named Alexey Gerasimov, made around $23 million from his YouTube channel DaFuq!?Boom! last year.
The popularity of Skibidi
Toilet among the under-tens has led to its being termed one of the first pieces of true Generation Alpha culture. Generation Alpha is the cohort born after 2010, who follow on from Gen-Z.
I learned about it via my four-yearold, who – to be clear – has never actually seen the series. Like any sensible parent, I do not allow him to roam YouTube unattended any more than I would allow him to frolic in an open sewer. He had simply heard other children say ‘Skibidi!’ in the playground and so started imitating them. The internet meme had metastasised into a playground meme, acquiring an almost unprecedented degree of pop cultural penetration. My 11-yearold explained
lent an extra something to already well-developed plots.
No wonder that Carol Reed, planning The Third Man (1949), wanted to include Radford and Wayne as Englishmen stuck in the ruins of Vienna. Sadly, by the final draft of the script, the duo had commingled into Wilfrid Hyde-White’s cultural ambassador character, Crabbin.
Radford’s sudden death in 1952 seemed to end the Charters-andCaldicott franchise. But in a 1979 remake of The Lady Vanishes, Arthur Lowe and Ian Carmichael reprised the pair.
Forty years ago, the BBC commissioned a Charters-and-Caldicott series, set in the 1980s, with Michael Aldridge as Caldicott and Robin Bailey as Charters.
The now elderly, widowed friends investigate a murder after Caldicott discovers the body of a woman in his London flat.
Bailey and Aldridge bicker like twin brothers at loggerheads, with much of the charm and humble yet heroic charisma of the original pair.
For fans of the duo, it is well worth a watch.
Harry Cluff
Lavatorial humour: Skibidi Toilet
this to me – and, as a relatively senior member of Gen Alpha, he was disdainful. Skibidi Toilet is the sort of ‘brain rot’ he associates with ‘iPad kids’.
An iPad kid, he explained, is ‘the kind of child who spends all their time watching crap on YouTube Kids. They have a tablet in a chunky red case, their fingers are covered in orange Wotsit crumbs, and they are capable of communicating only in low-grade internet memes.’ He blames the parents.
For many families, car journeys are unthinkable without personal entertainment devices. A GP told me that ‘literally 100 per cent’ of under-sixes who come to the surgery are handed a device by their parents to distract them.
A recent survey found that one in four children now arrives at primary school in nappies. Teachers have reported poor basic motor skills and underdeveloped muscles linked to excessive screen time.
It’s as if our entire civilisation is going down the skibidi toilet.
Richard Godwin
People find it extraordinary that, before the election day, 80 years ago, on 5th July 1945, we had never sat down as a family and discussed what we would do if my father should become Prime Minister.
It was such a strange election with the three-week wait between polling day and the count, to allow the huge postal vote from the servicemen and women overseas to reach their constituencies.
Tuesday 26th July was a day that began with breakfast round the kitchen table at home, my mother then driving us to Stepney for the count. The day ended with a wildly enthusiastic Labour Party rally in Westminster Hall, where my parents arrived a little late, having come straight from the Palace.
It was the early edition of the Evening Standard, glimpsed over a fellow passenger’s shoulder at Oxford Circus, that brought home to my sister Alison and me the full impact of what had happened. There was a picture of our father smiling and waving, a rosette in his buttonhole and a banner headline, ‘The new Prime Minister’. Alison and I joined hands and danced our way down Oxford Street.
We didn’t move into No 10 until October, as my father had no wish to hustle the Churchills out. He lived temporarily in the annexe in Great George Street, while my mother saw to the selling of our Stanmore home.
Living over the shop, as my father described No 10, was a great joy to him.
We had a comfortable family flat on the top floor and, once up there, he could leave the cares of Cabinet and State behind. He could pop home for tea, or to relax for an hour or two before going to an official reception or back to the House.
Gracious loser: Churchill
When Dad beat Winston
Felicity Harwood salutes her father, Clement Attlee, 80 years after Labour’s 1945 election victory
Felicity with Attlee at her wedding, Bucks, 1955
He used teatime as an opportunity to get to know the vast influx of new Labour MPs. They came to tea three or four at a time. Tony Benn once told me it was rather like going to tea with the headmaster.
As I was teaching at a nursery school in Bermondsey, I was quite often there for these tea parties.
After years of travelling in and out of London, he found our proximity to the House a great joy.
My father loved and understood Parliament so well – its in-jokes and traditions rooted in history.
He took great pride in the fact that two honourable members could argue bitterly across the floor of the House and then walk amiably down the corridor arm in arm to have a drink together in the Smoking Room.
In that Parliament of 1945-50, there was very little of the personal bitterness between government and opposition that was found in later administrations. Many of the Ministers and Shadow Cabinet had been fellow members of the wartime Government. They had shared the burden of steering this country through one of the most challenging times in its history.
Thinking of the friendship and affection between Government and opposition reminds me of the evening of 8th June 1946, the day of the Victory Parade.
Tony Benn told me teatime with Clement was like having tea with the headmaster
I heard Winston say, ‘Mine is a political seat.’
‘So is mine,’ said Ernie, ‘and it’s not safe.’
Among the lovely things about being Prime Minister are the weekends spent at Chequers – that beautiful Elizabethan house set in the Buckinghamshire countryside.
My father loved the sense of history of the old house. He had always been a great admirer of Oliver Cromwell, and
At 9.30 that morning, we had foregathered in one of the State drawing rooms at No 10.
The Churchill family arrived, followed by the Commonwealth Prime Ministers. My father and Winston Churchill drove together in an open carriage, saluting the crowds in the Mall, where they stood beside the King for the tremendously impressive march past.
There were fireworks that evening, and we went down to the terrace of the House of Commons, to watch the Royal Family arrive by launch. The weather turned rough and windy.
Later we watched the fireworks from indoors – Princess Alexandra, a small child of six, ran from window to window, exclaiming with delight.
To get a good view, two large men perched precariously on two small gilt chairs –Winston Churchill and Ernest Bevin.
so was delighted that one of Cromwell’s descendants had owned the house and endowed it with interesting letters and relics, including a life mask of Cromwell himself.
My first visit to Chequers was a weekend in August following the election. My father had recently returned from Potsdam, where he had astounded the Americans and confounded the Russians by returning with the same team of secretaries and advisers as had accompanied Churchill.
Saturday was one of those perfect English summer days; we sat out after lunch in the shade of a copper beech and later had tea on the terrace overlooking the rose garden.
There was croquet on the north lawn. My father played with great skill and a horrid habit of croqueting one from a long way off, just as one was nicely
The Attlee family in Stanmore, 1945: Felicity, 19; Clement Attlee; Martin, 17; Alison, 15; Violet Attlee, Clement’s wife; Janet, 22
positioned to go through a hoop. We played tennis, too, on those summer weekends. Down the road was the golf course at Ellesborough, where my parents enjoyed informal rounds of golf.
Those weekends at Chequers gave my father a chance to see his colleagues and members of his government in an entirely new light. The service chiefs came to stay, too.
Bomber Harris was our first guest. He and his wife came to dinner one Saturday evening in August. I remember him asking if the regime at Chequers had changed. In Winston’s day, it was late to bed and late to rise.
dinner on Christmas night and a children’s party on Boxing Day.
The Ramdays farmed the Chequers land. They had a new addition to their family every year – always a baby Jesus for their nativity play.
My father loved watching the children play musical bumps in the Great Hall and hide and seek round the house. My brother, Martin, made an excellent Father Christmas, appearing from a door in the panelling when the children’s backs were turned.
George VI and Attlee after his election victory, Buckingham Palace, 28th July 1945
After the election in 1950, when Labour was returned without a working majority, continuing to govern was hard. It was a year when sick men were carried through the lobbies to vote; when the very civilised custom of pairing almost broke down; when my father felt he hadn’t the country’s mandate to carry on.
It was almost a relief when the tide turned against the Labour Party in 1951. We had an extraordinarily convivial family dinner that night in October, when we knew our days at No 10 were at an end.
When my father took his seat in the Lords, it was not with the title he had often joked about: Lord Love-a-Duck of Limehouse! The man who had been known to so many of his supporters in Stepney as The Major became Lord Attlee of Walthamstow.
The gentle pace of the House of Lords was more in tune with his declining years. When my mother died, my father moved to the Inner Temple, within easy reach of the House, and was looked after by Alfred Laker with great devotion, until he died in 1967, at 84.
His last thoughts were of his old school, Haileybury, and the schoolboys of his youth. The last book he read was Pride and Prejudice
Were they, he wondered, expected to sit up until two in the morning?
My father laughed. ‘We go to bed soon after 11,’ he said.
Christmas at Chequers was a special joy, with murder in the dark played after
Of course, Chequers was used for official lunches and dinners too. I remember the Burmese delegation coming to lunch in 1947: Thakin Nu, Aung San, U Saw and U Tin Tut. They were charming and looked to me like delightful schoolboys. A few weeks later, U Saw had Aung San assassinated.
My father remarked drily, ‘Well, my dear, it isn’t often you sit down to lunch with the murderer on one side and the victim on the other.’
Those were fascinating years of living so close to history in the making. Years that nevertheless took their toll on my father’s health.
Christmas at Chequers, with murder in the dark, was a special joy
To the world, he was a socialist, even perhaps a revolutionary. At heart, he was a romantic. He loved the Pre-Raphaelite poets. His favourite poem was George Meredith’s ‘Love in the Valley’. He was a man who held dear the ties of home and family; who wanted others to enjoy what he had had in such full measure.
The young held a special place in his heart. How glad he would be to know that his memorial, in the shape of the Attlee Foundation, is helping the young of today and of future generations to come.
This is an extract from the unpublished talk Lady Felicity Harwood (1925-2007) gave on her father, Clement Attlee, in the 1980s. She would have turned 100 on 22nd August
Felicity Attlee, teaching at The Rachel McMillan College, Picture Post, 1946
On the road
After 40 years of travel shows, Griff Rhys Jones hits the Deep South
This summer, on Channel 4, I will appear to lay claim to the Land of Cotton.
Griff’s American South contains all the essential aerial, train and crowd shots you desire, and introduces y’all to six states, in six weeks.
I plunge into the Deep South – from quilt-making to bluegrass (at the Gospel Chicken House in the Appalachian Mountains) and meet cheerleaders casually tossing one another 16 feet into the air.
There’s no CGI. It’s all real. I do actually get into a drag-racing car with Frogg, we do actually hit 100mph after a sixth of a mile, and that is my real facial expression as I try to find a non-existent seat belt.
Forty years after I was first recruited to point at things and say, ‘How beautiful,’ I still get the thrills, even if these days they come mainly from trying to do the whole shoot on a ludicrously hectic schedule.
We used to be given three weeks to make one 45-minute programme. For this series, they allowed us a whole five days for the same length of show, and that was after I had asked for an extra day.
Mind you, the ambition of the commissioners has not diminished one jot. They still demand distance, jeopardy and ludicrous spectacle. I flew in microlights and biplanes, drove pick-up trucks and piloted tiny canoes through massive locks, but just a wee bit faster than before.
Instead of spending a day filming an item, we aimed to get it done before breakfast. ‘You’ll have to put me down now, pilot. No time for another go-round, I’m afraid.’
Improvisation is the key. ‘There’s a massive Thanksgiving Parade happening downtown – we’ll shoot that.’
I watch those self-indulgent naturalhistory follow-ups – The Making of The Turquoise Planet, or whatever – and I goggle. ‘They returned the next year?!’ I’d be lucky if I got three minutes with any penguins.
Forty years ago, I was sent to the delta in Sudan to provide some inserts for Comic Relief. That initiation felt odd. I had previously only ever mocked being a
presenter: ‘I’m standing in the middle of a lake … and I don’t know why.’ Now I was purporting to be a real one.
The Bridget Jones author, Helen Fielding, was our producer. I drank too much coffee from a thimble-sized cup, and lay awake all night, fretting about the short bit we had travelled 10,000 miles to shoot.
Cameraman, assistant, producer, sound man, fixers and assistant producer waited. And I was the one who had to point out the inconsistencies.
‘This is the delta. It hasn’t rained here for ten years…’ I intoned. ‘Er, Helen, there’s a problem here.’
‘What?’
‘Well, it’s raining.’
‘Where?’
‘Look – coming down from that cloud.’
‘We can’t see that.’
‘All right, but I am standing in a puddle.’
We settled on ‘It may be raining now … etc.’
I found the whole process oddly liberating – though not as much as my next director, Harry Hook, did. After proper features in Hollywood, he could now film in the bush without a hundred studio execs pecking him to death, and with no lengthy pauses while make-up artfully rearranged a lock of my hair.
He gleefully shot over 30 hours of material. He hardly had enough time to view it all before the edit.
But then ‘factual TV’ itself got edited. Celluloid was junked. Cameras got tiny and then, mysteriously, huge again, festooned with more and more batteries and gizmos. The spray-shooting era began. The drone buzzed in, and every shot could be a helicopter shot. The sound man’s assistant got laid off. The cameraman’s assistant went to work in Currys. I’m surprised I’m still working myself, frankly.
Dumbing down? Oddly, I think I’ve dumbed up. In the past, it was essential
to hog-tie a crocodile. Or dangle off a mountain – ‘But I’ve never climbed a mountain. What if I fall off?’
‘If you could fall off, that would be terrific.’
In the past, when my bike skidded off a low cliff in New Zealand, and I grabbed a bush, and was finally in my own cliffhanger, I actually yelled, ‘Don’t stop shooting!’
Every whizz, bang and crash went in. My thoughtful and well-researched commentaries got cut.
Then a couple of years ago, I went off to cross the second-biggest country in the world in six weeks. There was no time for second takes. What I intoned in Canada stayed in the picture. It was a content hit and I’m back.
Otherwise, nothing has changed.
The interview in the oldest gay bookshop in the world with a girl who had only started the previous week and knew absolutely nothing about it. The hunting club where 12 separate members looked peeved when I declined to shoot a real moose. The 100-mile detour to gather honey in the forests of Zambia in winter, when the bees had eaten the lot.
All still needed a bit of improvisation and extra guff. That’s the kick of the thing. I love it.
Griff’s American South is on Channel 4 this summer
Captain America: Griff
Dr Jonathan Katz, Oxford’s Public Orator, maintains the university’s ancient roots
Latin lover
The best job in the university’ was how the post of Oxford Public Orator was described to me by one of our Bedels, those good-humoured stave-bearing stalwarts who guide the most august university ceremonies.
He meant, of course, not the bestremunerated post but the one that brings its occupant the most fun. Academics in Britain are wise not to measure enjoyment by remuneration.
And fun it is, even when I’m pulled into apparent controversy, as recently happened over the question of ‘genders’ in our Latin ceremonies.
How, asked our senior management, could we address graduands and others in our degree ceremonies with up-to-date language that neither privileges the masculine with its nouns, pronouns and adjectives nor limits the necessary formulae to masculine and feminine, but equally includes non-binary supplicants?
And why not pay the same attention to other regular events such as the admission ceremonies for senior officers – Vice-Chancellor, Proctors and so on?
News of imminent tinkering with our old ceremonial language naturally upset some traditionalists. But perhaps it warmed other hearts that, rather than our giving up on Latin altogether, it was
proposed to exercise the language’s own resources and find forms that are both grammatically acceptable and compliant with modern sensibilities.
The required doctoring of the formulae was achieved, after some discussion with me and other colleagues, by one of our Deans of Degrees, my excellent Latinist colleague Dr Tristan Franklinos.
When asked to approve the result, I did so quite happily, not unduly fazed by the ideological and administrative questions underlying the changes – even if I felt there were, and perhaps remain, other possible approaches. No great violence was done to the language, and the proposed changes are very slight.
Thank the gods for the third declension, which hardly ever visibly distinguishes masculine and feminine and works pretty well for both, and more.
The same goes for the convenient second-person pronouns, as indeed in English and many other languages.
A masculine and feminine formula such as Magistri et Magistrae or Domini et Dominae, used to address graduands by the Vice-Chancellor or her (their?) deputy, could be changed to the simpler Scholares or Studentes – or even in places the gender-neutral pronoun vos (‘you’).
Praesento vobis hos meos et has meas
Martin Scorsese (third left) and Mary Beard (second right) queue for Dr Katz’s Latin oration, Oxford Encaenia, 2018
scholares (‘I present to you these my male and female students’) could become the neater, gender-neutral Praesento scholares hic adstantes (‘I present to you the students here present’).
The revised form of wording was submitted for approval by Congregation, the governing body of the University.
There was, of course, some opposition. But, after a motion was tabled to accept an amended version, a good-natured debate was held in the Sheldonian.
Nunc mihi vir adstat qui ipse professus est se in theatro cinematographico didicisse quomodo ea intellegere tandemque depingere posset quae diligenda quidem sed subtilia ubique circumstent... Picturam et poesim
nonnulli maiorum nostrorum comparabant; honorandus noster ex mobilium illarum imaginum arte genus suum proprium poesis peperit; et hac lingua, ut ita dicam, tam ad gaudium quam ad dolorem praebendum usus, etiam extrema rerum humanarum praesentat inter loca et condiciones mire varias, clarissime descriptas.
Nobis enim ex huius
fabulis imagines offeruntur modo tranquillitatis, modo Urbium Feritatis et violentiae minarumque.
Saepe tamen et mutantur res – illum taurum furentem revoco et autoraedarium conducticium, praedoneM OBSTinatum Henricum Hill, qui tiro se feliciorem habebat Praeside Civitatum Unitarum,
et sacerdotem iuvenem Sebastianum in ‘Silentio’ versantem....
Praesento summum inter artifices magistrum, qui arte sua spectatores docet commotosque in nova transportat, Martinum Carolum Scorsese, cinematographiae auctorem et conservatorem, ut admittatur honoris causa ad gradum Doctoris in Litteris.
The opposition was defeated and, in October, dis volentibus, the new forms of address will come into regular use.
The Orator’s normal duties are more rewarding than this. I keep an eye on all the Latin used on formal occasions. Often adjustments and updatings are needed – names for new degrees and academic titles; forms of proper names.
From time to time, I’m asked to check a Latin or Greek motto, write or translate a grace or a poem to be inscribed somewhere, or revise somebody’s translation, and I help examine for one or two of the University’s prizes.
Beside me now stands a man to whom, in his own words, the cinema has given a means of understanding, and eventually expressing, what is precious and fragile in the world around him....
Some ancient thinkers likened poetry to painting; he has created his own kind of poetry in ‘moving pictures’ and
But, more prominently, since the foundation of the office in the 16th century, the Orator has been charged with representing the University at formal events, now most notably the splendid Encaenia ceremony held in the Sheldonian Theatre just after the end of each Trinity (summer) Term.
The main substance of this, apart from the Creweian Oration, a speech in which I thank major recent benefactors and report on some noteworthy events of the last year, is the awarding of honorary doctorates to distinguished guests. There are normally eight or nine of them, from around the world. (Printed below is the 2018 speech for Martin Scorsese.)
For each of them, I compose and deliver a five-minute oration, in something resembling 1st-century-BC Latin prose. The invited audience can follow the printed Latin text alongside an English paraphrase.
Honorands come from many areas of academic research and public service. I’ve occasionally taken a furtive look at how the Vatican – I mean merely Vatican Latin – copes with important modern concepts that figure in our everyday lives.
sequences of images. It is a language that he uses to paint both joy and pain, one in which he places extremes of human experience in contexts and landscapes of extraordinary range and vividness, some of quietude, others of violence, Mean Streets and brutality. But so often in these films there is a theme of transformation: the Raging Bull, the Taxi Driver, the
For example, what might be the Latin for such concepts as ‘skyscraper’ and ‘women’s ordination’, ‘renewable energy’, ‘divestment’, ‘gene editing’ or ‘gender identity’? These kinds of things may increasingly crop up both in Papal encyclicals and in our local discourse. Sometimes we share ideas; sometimes not.
Much more often, I am left to my own devices. One task is the occasional translingual pun, ie a Latin word or phrase that sounds like an English expression in the required context.
Latin eae, for instance, works rather nicely when we’re on the subject of artificial intelligence – as in AI.
Latin spelling can suggest an English concept more visually and semantically. An email could of course be a message sent per aethera. More economically, one could say simply epistula emissa and stress the first syllable.
On consulting orations by my predecessors, I found that what we now call radio was once rendered as sine filo transmissio (work that one out!), but perhaps needs adjustment now.
‘Broadcasting’ figures twice in the forthcoming orations (discretion forbids spoilers). Also appearing are terms in molecular biology, neurophysiology and Ukrainian history.
All in all, we’ll aim to show, as when addressing 21st-century groups of degree-day graduands, that Latin is surprisingly well up to the job.
And there’s another important point: it’s a beautiful language. Sed nil mirum quod hoc censeam! (‘But I suppose I would say that, wouldn’t I?’).
Dr Jonathan Katz is the Oxford University Public Orator. He was Head of Classics at Westminster School
career mobster Henry Hill of Goodfellas (‘better than being President of the United States’), the young priest Rodrigues in Silence
I present a creative master, whose art instructs, provokes and transforms his viewers, Martin Charles Scorsese, director and preserver of the art of film, to be admitted to the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters.
This is an extract from Dr Katz’s Honorary Degree Oration for Martin Scorsese at the Oxford Encaenia in 2018. Highlighted in red are the references to some of Scorsese’s most famous films. Note, too, the translingual pun in the word MOBST, written in capitals – as in ‘mobster’.
Such wordplay is popular in Latin orations.
Powell’s Sistine Chapel
While Anthony Powell wrote his epic series of novels, he also embarked on a vast collage. By Hope Coke, his great-granddaughter
My great-grandfather, the novelist Anthony Powell (1905-2000), had a predilection for mammoth projects.
His best-known work, the 12-volume series A Dance to the Music of Time, is famously (perhaps infamously) long,
published from 1951 to 1975. And the sprawling, 360-degree collage that he created at the Chantry, his Somerset home, engulfing the walls, the ceiling and even the pipes of a basement boiler room, took some 15 years to complete.
Tony Powell was a keen artist from boyhood. His fascination with art was a
running thread throughout his life –the title for Dance came from a Poussin painting. This year marks the 25th anniversary of his death, and 50 years since the completion of Dance. And 60 years ago he embarked on the most ambitious visual art project of his lifetime.
My great-grandmother Violet Powell, a writer and editor herself, was a significant influence on Tony’s work, providing sound literary judgement and emotional support.
She was also a collaborator on his first large-scale collage, created soon after the couple were married. Tony’s biographer, Hilary Spurling, describes a ‘folding scrap-screen’ the newly-weds decorated, ‘collecting, cutting out and pasting’ together.
What originated as a ‘companionable pastime’ would later become a solitary passion for Tony. Prone to bouts of
depression, he seemed to find comfort in the methodical labour of cutting and sticking.
‘It was a relaxation from sitting typing,’ my great-uncle John Powell, Tony’s younger son, tells me.
Tony and Violet moved from London to Somerset in 1952, with their two sons: film director Tristram Powell (19402024), my late grandfather, and John.
I was two years old in 2000, when Tony died, and can’t claim to have any first-hand memories of him. I can recall Violet (1912-2002), who died two years later, through only the vaguest sensations. The softness of her jumper. Her floral, powdery scent. Her steady patience with a fidgeting toddler, as I sat on her lap to be read to.
But visits to the Chantry, where John lives to this day, were a cornerstone of my early years, its treasures and oddities providing endless stimulation for a curious child.
Slipping away after pudding (tinned peaches and cream), my brother and I would go exploring. The house was filled with relics of a bygone age: a carved angel looming above the hallway; a defunct dumb waiter on an upstairs landing; a Venetian puppet theatre in one of the bedrooms, with funny little threadbare figures on wires.
But the real delights were to be found in the basement, which housed a laundry room, a billiards room and the boiler room.
Tony had long harboured ambitions to collage an entire room. It wasn’t until the 1960s, however, that this work began in earnest – by which time he had access to a rich array of material, thanks to the wider proliferation of colour magazines. The Sunday Times was the first colour supplement, published in 1962.
Above: Lady Violet Powell (Anthony Powell’s wife), Hope and Harry Coke, the Chantry, 2000
Left: Liz Taylor and Alice in Wonderland
Opposite: Anthony Powell and his collage at the Chantry, Somerset, 1975
Right: Ferdinand Mount and Jilly Cooper
‘He stored illustrations of every sort from years before, in two tea chests,’ says John.
Tony started assembling the collage in around 1965, by then firmly in the midst of his work on Dance, escaping to the quiet depths of ‘the warm boiler room’ for a reprieve from writing.
He laid the foundations using French posters, and then gradually stuck scraps around them, adding sections little by little.
legends jostle among cartoons, film stars, Playboy bunnies and the occasional cat.
John notes that his father chose his compositions with deliberate irreverence: ‘He liked rearranging photographs or pictures, putting different people in strange situations.’
There are orchestrated meetings between W B Yeats and Elizabeth Taylor; Dylan Thomas and a young Prince Charles; Abraham Lincoln, Harold Acton and Robert Hardy; Brigitte Bardot, the Brontë sisters and Somerset Maugham.
Family members also feature among the fray: Tony deposited his niece, Antonia Fraser, beside W H Auden and Robert Graves; while his nephew, Ferdinand Mount, peeks out beside Jilly Cooper, her
Left: W H Auden; Virginia Woolf; Antonia Fraser; Robert Graves. Below left: Byron. Below right: Dylan Thomas and the King
‘Over the years, one saw it grow,’ remembers John.
And grow it did. At first glance, one is stunned by the sheer scale, unable to digest its intricacy and detail amid the overwhelming whole. The initial impression can be unnerving. Spurling dubs it ‘a monstrous collage’ – ‘horrifying’ in its ‘surrealistic disturbance’.
While it certainly has a whiff of the deranged about it, closer inspection also brings to light its spirit of playfulness.
The breadth of subject matter runs the gamut of history and culture, from the high- to the not-so-highbrow. Disparate worlds collide, as classical artefacts, Old Master paintings, politicians and literary
face sadly obscured by a copper pipe for the new boiler.
Three of those collage faces –Jilly Cooper, Antonia Fraser and Ferdinand Mount – will be at a lunch in June at the National Liberal Club. It salutes the 25th anniversary of Tony’s death, the 25th anniversary of the Anthony Powell Society and the 50th anniversary of the completion of Dance.
Tony was well into his 70s by the time he finished the boiler-room collage. For all its eclectic absurdity, it manifests many of his most admired traits as a writer, reflecting his satirical wit and keen observational eye.
On childhood visits to the Chantry, and still today, it’s in the boiler room that I feel closest to my great-grandfather.
And I am drawn to the spirit of mischief in a man who glued Lord Byron into position – his moody gaze levelled straight at the chest of a model in a bikini.
‘England has only one military painter, and that is a woman.’
Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, French military painter, 1890
That must have upset the Victorian apple cart. Ladies were to have not a career, but a home and family.
But, still, thousands queued to see Lady Butler’s work at the Royal Academy. Galleries and collectors vied for pictures by ‘the soldiers’ painter’, as she was known. She was made welcome at army manoeuvres and set up her easel in front of cavalry charges. She was a celebrity – a quarter of a million photographs of her were sold in Britain alone.
Lady Butler (1846-1933) was the first female war painter – and my greatgrandmother. Born Elizabeth Thompson in Switzerland, she married the soldier Sir William Butler (1838-1910) and had six children with him.
She was an empath, using veterans as models. She never went to war.
Her oeuvre stretched from the Victorian era to the Edwardian. She painted masterful battle scenes, under Constable skies. Violence was about to happen, or had just happened.
The painter was not just a colonial propagandist. She was one of the first social realist artists. Lady Butler painted
Above: Lady Butler’s self-portrait, 1869. Below: The Roll Call, 1874
the reality of war, from the point of view of the working man. There are few ceremonial uniforms, and plenty of muddy, bloody greatcoats. Britain fought at least one colonial conflict every ten years during her career, and prospered from it.
There was a market for battle scenes, and Elizabeth had set her sights on it from a young age, despite the gender apartheid that looked down on women studying art.
She managed to study at the Female School of Art at South Kensington and the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence.
In 1874, at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, The Roll Call – inspired by the 1854 Battle of Inkerman – thrust Elizabeth into the public eye. The painting found fame and fortune, selling to Queen Victoria for ten times its original price.
A policeman had to keep off the crowds. It’s still in the Royal Collection. Crimean veterans applauded it. The press had called Inkerman ‘the soldiers’ battle’. The rank and file fought hand to hand, with no command. Here a woman was painting their truth. She had painted them as the protagonists of the battle.
The composition of the picture took an entirely novel approach to the genre. Military scenes were usually painted from above. Here, the soldiers present themselves head on, battered, bandaged and exhausted, in a long, disorderly line. A man has collapsed, perhaps dead. A non-commissioned officer, bandaged, takes the roll call. A bearskin is discarded on the ground. There are no colourful lead soldiers. The colour scheme is dominated by a monochrome of grey coats and black bearskins.
With such critical and public acclaim, it seemed obvious the Royal Academy would vote her in.
They didn’t. Laura Knight was the first female to achieve this honour, in 1936.
Apart from The Roll Call, Elizabeth’s paintings were exhibited in the poorly-lit back room of the Royal Academy; or skied above eye-level. The male academicians knew her place, even if she didn’t.
Lady Butler was to repeat the theme of the battered soldier returning often: Balaclava (1876) depicts the Light Brigade after its disastrous charge in 1854. Men cling onto one another in the aftermath of the bloody misdirection of orders.
A record sum was paid for its copyright, though critics accused it of being over-sentimental. They particularly objected to the veteran Pennington in his role as the main trooper. He walks towards the viewer in a state of total shock. Trauma was not the done thing.
In The Return from Inkerman (1877), the last of the Crimean series, we see her remarkable empathy for the pitiful conditions of soldiers as a regiment returns from battle. The Return from Inkerman’s copyright sold for £3,000
The soldiers’ painter
Piers Butler salutes his great-grandmother, Lady Butler, who depicted great British battles with deep humanity
pounds, a record, paid by the Fine Art Society in New Bond Street.
The Remnants of an Army (1879) shows a lone survivor, Dr William Brydon, staggering into camp on horseback during the First Anglo-Afghan War.
Elizabeth tended to avoid painting the imperial war machine in active engagement, though she received commissions to do so.
Queen Victoria commissioned The Defence of Rorke’s Drift. And Quatre Bras (1875) is a bristling study of the famous British square formation in action at Waterloo. Three hundred men staged a re-enactment specifically for her, while eight soldiers posed in her studio in the Fulham Road.
Scotland For Ever (1881) is a head-on cavalry charge at Waterloo. It is a masterly composition, with exemplary painting techniques. The sword-yielding
devils on horseback threaten to leap out of the canvas.
The last of the Napoleonic series is The Dawn of Waterloo (1895). Wellington, who I have always thought to be one of the figures in the work, said, ‘Nothing except a battle lost can be half as melancholy as a battle won.’ Buglers wake sleeping troopers on the battlefield. The spectre of death is contrasted against a beautiful sky.
The Royal Academy placed the painting poorly, and so Elizabeth received little attention for it. She thought this treatment ‘unkind’ and the following year did not submit a painting. In 2021, fierce bidding broke out over the painting at Bonhams. The Dawn of Waterloo sold for a record price for her pictures, £325,000.
‘The soldier’s painter’ loved a man in a uniform. She married Irishman Lieutenant-General Sir William Butler.
Above: The Remnants of an Army, 1879. Below: Scotland For Ever, 1881
They became a celebrity couple. He said of The Defence of Rorke’s Drift, ‘One more painting like this and you shall drive me mad.’ He was referring to the imbalance of a battle fought with guns against spears.
Sir William was a radical, supporting Irish Home Rule. Elizabeth painted two works on the Irish question: a recruitment scene with subtle undertones, Listed for the Connaught Rangers (1878), and Evicted (1890).
Lady Butler’s commitment to being a soldier’s wife and a mother, and her leaving the cut and thrust of the art world in London for Gormanston Castle, County Meath, Ireland, saw her success diminish. But she remained prolific, occasionally receiving commissions and continuing to paint the soldiers’ story.
The later works include A London Irish at Loos (1916). It depicts an assault on the German trenches, led by the London Irish Rifles hoofing a football.
Modest, a play based on her battles with the Royal Academy, toured in 2023.
It was put on by Milk Presents, a trans movement and gender-fluid theatre company. The feminist icon Lady Butler would have found the musical queer. But it voiced the struggle for an equal footing, citing her as a leader in the feminist movement against intolerable conditions.
Lady Butler, though sometimes overlooked, now has her place in art history.
A penny for the guide dogs
Liz Hodgkinson longs for cash collection boxes
They used to be a familiar sight in the High Street: charity collectors rattling tins and those lovely old Labrador collection boxes for Guide Dogs for the Blind.
As you passed, you dug out some loose change for them. That way, they were likely to collect quite a lot of money.
But no longer. Not only do you rarely see such collectors these days, but most charities won’t even take cash any more.
Out shopping recently, I was waylaid by a paramedic standing by a stall for the Thames Valley Air Ambulance charity.
I was happy to support it. But while I was looking in my wallet for cash, I was told, ‘Sorry, we don’t accept cash.’
What? Next, I got out my card to make a oneoff donation and was informed, ‘Sorry, we can’t take for one-offs; only for regular contributions.’
So they had to make do without my widow’s mite and that of many other passers-by.
Cash is useful, quick and – most importantly – anonymous. You can’t be traced when you pay or donate in cash. If you sign up to pay a monthly amount to a charity, you are always contactable.
No way did I want to be dragooned into making a permanent commitment. If we aren’t very careful, cash will
Most charities won’t even take cash any more
disappear altogether. Ever more businesses – and charities are pretty much businesses these days – say, somewhat proudly, that they are cashless. The frozen-food chain Cook no longer accepts cash; nor do plenty of shops.
To keep cash alive, people should do what I do. Get out wads of notes from an ATM –although these are fast vanishing as well – and insist on paying with the folding stuff.
And avoid, wherever possible, the soulless, inhuman cashless concerns.
Rolling with the Stones
Fifty years ago, Christopher Simon Sykes photographed the band on their American tour
n the early summer of 1975, I found myself on tour round the USA with the Rolling Stones, employed to take photographs for a tour diary.
It was my first ever photographic assignment covering rock ’n’ roll – I’d previously specialised in photographing the interiors of stately homes.
The job had come about after a chance meeting with the Stones’ financial manager, Prince Rupert Loewenstein, who told me the
band were looking for someone to put together a diary of their upcoming tour of the USA.
They had not yet employed anyone to do this, but he told me that if I wanted the job, I would have to fly to the USA, where they were already rehearsing at Andy Warhol’s house in Montauk.
I would have to pay my own fare – but if I got the job, he would reimburse me. So off I went, heart in mouth, taking with me my ideas on how the book should be done.
I duly met the band, made my suggestions and left with the words ‘Don’t ring us, we’ll ring you’ ringing
Jumpin’ Jack Flash: Charlie Watts and Mick Jagger, Madison Square Garden, June 1975
in my ears. The one smart thing I did as I left the house was to get the telephone number from one of the security guards.
Back in England, I found myself awaiting a decision that never seemed to come. From time to time, I would ring the number I had jotted down and would invariably speak to someone from security, who would promise to pass on my message to Mick, who never returned my call.
Eventually Prince Rupert told me that he thought the project wasn’t going to happen, because he couldn’t get Mick to make up his mind.
‘But has he actually said no?’ I asked – to which Prince Rupert’s reply was ‘No, but I think he’s going to.’
That night, feeling thoroughly depressed, I went to a party in London, got quite drunk, and decided to call Mick one more time to hear the decision from the horse’s mouth. I dialled the number and miraculously, for the very first time, Mick answered the phone.
‘What, Rupert told you I didn’t want you on the tour?’ he said, pausing before adding, ‘Well, you call Rupert now and tell him I do want you to come!’
And that is how I found myself in Milwaukee, Kansas, on 8th June attending my very first Rolling Stones gig.
Right: Charlie Watts, Madison Square Garden. Below: Ronnie Wood, the band’s new boy, Milwaukee County Stadium, 1975
‘You know going on tour is not like country life, Chrissie,’ commented Mick on my first day. And it certainly did turn out to be an eye-opener, as I accompanied the band on their threemonth tour of North America and Canada, playing 40 shows in 27 cities.
I recall the first show I attended as if it was yesterday. They didn’t have a security pass for me, as I’d just arrived. So they put me to stand at the back of the stage in the huge outdoor arena.
I kept pinching myself to remind myself that I really was there.
When the band walked on, and struck up the opening bars of ‘Honky Tonk Women’, I felt the hairs standing up on my arms.
After that, I received my security pass and became, to all intents and purposes, another member of the band, travelling with them on the Star Ship, their private jet, and hanging out with them in their hotels. The photographs that I took over the next few months were for use in a tour diary that was to be published the following year; a new exhibition in Yorkshire showcases a selection of the best of them.
They are a unique record of a memorable time.
Christopher Simon Sykes: On Tour with the Rolling Stones 1975 is on show at Sledmere House, Yorkshire, 13th June to 6th July
Clockwise from left: Bill Wyman and Keith Richards, Madison Square Garden; Mick Jagger, Milwaukee County Stadium – all June 1975
Mary Killen’s Beauty Tips
Danger! Lip-plumping alert
Stay natural – lilo lips look ridiculous
It’s sad, really, how misguided humans can be.
If women want to be more attractive to men, rather than to other women, then it’s a mistake to suddenly have giant, fat lips out of proportion to your face.
The eye registers that it’s a face that nature intended to have thin lips, and so the effect is jarring.
The great mistake is to spend too much time staring in the mirror. You start to see faults where often there are none.
Big lips don’t suit everyone. And yet many women stare at themselves for too long in the mirror and the next thing they have had fillers or lip-plumping balm. And the next thing they look ridiculous.
Even the adverts for lip-plumping products show the models looking normal before – and, after, looking ridiculous.
I have never once heard a man say, ‘Well, I do think X is extremely attractive, but I am put off by her thin lips.’
Two of the thinnest-lipped women I know are married to two of the most attractive men. These women virtually have no lips; just slits in their faces.
It’s the whole package the man is interested in – the whole atmosphere that the woman brings with her.
Ask yourself – do I like Lucy/Mary/ Frances/Rachel because she has big, fat lips extending out of their faces like lilos, or because she is nice and good company?
Apply the same rationale to any aspect of looks.
I am all for a woman veiling burst veins and black circles, tweezing beards and moustaches, and adding blusher to make herself look less deadly, and powder to mattify glistening.
But lip-fillers are a mistake.
Plumping ingredients can increase the flow of blood to the lips – ginger-root oil and capsicum peppers.
They sound so natural,
don’t they? But the mixture tingles because it is being disruptive.
You can become tolerant and need to use more and more. And yet, in a balm, you are not supposed to use more than one per cent of such products.
One nice woman, who sadly recently died, got married for the first time at the age of 53 to one of the richest men in the world. With access to the best plastic surgeons, she had lip extensions which turned out to be wrongly sized and could not be reversed. She just misjudged what was necessary through staring at her face in the mirror for too long.
So forget lip-plumper. But lip balms (which include sun-protection factors) are necessary. In summer, our lips become dry because they don’t have sebum like the rest of our skin. And we lose a lot of moisture in the heat.
If you are a mouth-breather, you generate more dryness, as do lip-lickers – an enzyme in saliva dries lips out.
Most lip balms are just Vaseline, with something else added so the manufacturers can charge more. But Vaseline is fine on its own and it’s the cheapest. Vaseline Rosy Lips SPF 15 Lip Balm is a roll-up stick
Those who prefer lanolin to Vaseline can buy Lansinoh’s 100-per-cent-natural lip balm for £6.99. Breastfeeding mothers discovered its efficacy as a lip balm when they saw how well it worked to soothe cracked nipples.
But lipstick will do the same job of lubrication and it’s a more glamorous thing to carry around. But beware the Cruella de Vil look – worse when the lipstick bleeds into the ‘pleats’ between lip and nose.
For years, we associated glamour with Liz Taylor and Marilyn Monroe and their glistening red lips.
But children and men are often subliminally frightened by women with blood-red slashes across the centre of their faces. Sometimes it has its origin in fear of clowns – or coulrophobia.
Women, according to my dental consultant, like to use bright lipstick when they’ve had their teeth whitened – it sets off the whitened teeth nicely.
A Huffington Post poll asked 20 men what they thought about lipstick. One said, ‘I don’t understand why some women think wearing lipstick with shorts and a T-shirt is normal. It just looks bizarre. It would be like if I wore a tie with shorts and a T-shirt.’
At the Met Gala this year, it was clear that nude lipsticks – as worn by Twiggy in the 1960s – have made a comeback in older women. Pamela Anderson was leading the field. So many lips were ‘naked’, whether matte or glossy. The Goth look has peaked. I don’t want to be a killjoy. Buy lipstick by all means – but search for one that could possibly look as though your lips were naturally that colour. Pink is absurd. No one’s lips are pink. Red, please – and matte.
Read my lips: Liz Taylor, 1950s, and Pamela Anderson, 2025
RIP BO
What happened to body odour? The Clean Young Generation have washed it away for ever. By Candida Crewe
Harriet Dart, Britain’s number-four tennis player, recently asked an official to tell her French opponent, Lois Boisson, to put on some deodorant. ‘She smells really bad,’ Dart said. Her words caused something of a stink. The incident made me think: when did BO disappear in civilian life? You barely smell it anywhere these days.
At my school, one girl’s BO was so notorious I can still remember her name 45 years on, though I have never seen or heard of her since. I blanche with shame at how bitchy we were about the overwhelming stink. No one wanted to be in her class or dorm. She had no friends. BO was brutal back then, for the sufferer and for those around. A friend told me BO was a huge thing at his public school. Cold communal showers and predatory beaks didn’t encourage prevention. My peers have only to say ‘BO’ and we instantly regress and giggle at the awful memory.
I say memory because, somewhere along the line, BO, like the dodo, became extinct. When did you last smell it, except on the Central Line in high summer? Around 1998, maybe?
I have three sons in their twenties. My boyfriend says my house occasionally has a ‘definitely masculine’ air. In their teens my sons stank of feet, weed and boy – though never BO for long. Their pits smelt after exercise, but then only for seconds before they hotfooted it into the shower, where they remained for perplexing lengths of time.
Their friends were barely dressed (braless girls in skimpy vests; topless boys, in shorts only). None of them smelt. When I was their age, showers existed but were not ubiquitous. Now, even indifferent Airbnbs have – dread phrase – wet rooms, equipped with quasi-fire hydrants.
Remember Jerry Hall saying Mick liked her unwashed.
Was it a postwar austerity mentality that Boomers inherited? I was born in 1964 but laughed along with my parents at Americans with their poncy washy ways.
Now it is shocking to hear people admitting they don’t wash every day. I have a bath four times a year, but not a day goes by – ever – without my having a shower, and occasionally two.
When my (now ex-) husband and I bought a good-size terraced house in London in 1997, we had one bathroom. It didn’t occur to us to put in a shower. Roll-top baths were the thing. But they take a while to fill – so they definitely weren’t a daily thing.
Roll on 30 years and the thought
in global temperatures and tempting shower gels, rather than just Imperial Leather.
I began running every day and didn’t want single-handedly to make BO fashionable again. The attitude of my children’s generation that daily washing is de rigueur was taking over. And when I hit 50, there was the dread of turning into a stinking old woman.
Some contemporaries – the last bastions against this modern hygiene obsession – speak darkly and in hushed, nervous tones of going for days without washing. One woman friend says that when she does wash, she never uses soap.
Below 50, the everyday shower is nonnegotiable. Above 50, washing is a much looser notion, even if not washing has become something of a dirty little secret.
One friend, 54, has a definite whiff about him. Neither he nor his wife is domestically inclined. So their washing kit and washing machine see little action. His adult children are petrified he is turning into a stinky old man.
It’s also because the couple’s daughter is in the shower for 20 minutes, minimum, every day, in their remote cottage.
She has priority and steps out of it only when there is literally no water left, hot or cold – for her or anyone else.
How old is she? Eleven, FFS. But she’s The Future.
When we in our sixties die out, BO will go to the grave with us – and, I dare say, the elderly will smell of pee. Younger ones will wash twice a day (or more) as standard, as long as our water supplies hold out under
In the eighties, the bath still reigned. Some fastidious types had one every day, but by no means everyone. I didn’t. Back then, even just twice a week was normal, with no shame attached.
levels of ‘personal care’, the
traditional stench of the underarm
BO is over, just as surely as crabs were toast the moment millennials started dispensing with
Prue’s News
Queen of the Empire State
I last went up the Empire State Building 40 years ago and I’d forgotten what a truly gobsmacking experience it is.
Visitors have been gawping at the view for almost 100 years, and yet today it’s as fresh and exciting as ever. Some 2.6 million visitors visited last year, paying $129 million, as much as the commercial rents bring in.
The building belongs to that wonderfully confident, spacious, ’30s New York style, with Art Deco everywhere.
It takes up a whole block and has five public entrances manned by smartly dressed doormen (maroon uniforms, peaked hats, lots of gold braid), politely and tirelessly redirecting the public to the visitors’ entrance.
Providing observation platforms is a competitive business and always has been. The aim in 1931 was for it to be the tallest building in the world, which for almost 40 years it was. Today it still boasts the
highest outside viewing platform in the West (the Burj Khalifa in Dubai beats it).
But visitors want more than a breezy view of tiny skaters in Bryant Park a thousand feet below, and a dizzying layout of NYC, with Central Park taking up 800-plus acres and the comforting vast back-up reservoir to water New York in a crisis.
They want an ‘experience’ – and the Empire State Building team provides it. There is a museum, with the history of the building, and a brilliant film of its construction. A worker, perched like a monkey high on scaffolding, rhythmically flings hot rivets to a mate who hammers
building, clutching tiny Ann Darrow (Fay Wray) in his fist. Recently, the marketing team erected a similarly huge blow-up dragon which straddled several top floors. They hauled him up overnight, to surprise the populace the next day.
It nearly didn’t work: the dragon burst like the balloon it was, having ripped a 12-foot tear in the body. They had to send an abseiler up with giant needle and thread to hang in the air while he sewed up the gash. They blew the dragon up again, before dawn broke.
I got the VIP treatment as I was in New York to flog my new book, ‘guesting’ on telly, radio, podcasts, book-signings – anyone who would have me; even the dreaded TikTok.
Prue’s view: Empire State Building Supported by
single blow, then
It turns out the Empire State Building does all that promoting too. So I got a free tour while they took photos of me hanging over the balcony edge, in a pose I realise every VIP since Fay Wray has adopted. Whether the pics will prompt more visitors for them, or book sales for me, is anyone’s guess. But, honestly, if I’d had to pay for my trip and buy my ticket, I’d have thought it well worth it.
If you’ve never been, go now. It’s truly great.
Prue Leith presents The Great British Bake Off
Literary Lunch
15th July 2025 At the National Liberal Club, 1 Whitehall Place, London SW1A 2HE
Lucy Moore on Christopher Gibbs: His World The antiques dealer’s life story from Chelsea in the 1960s to Tangier in the 2010s
David Hepworth on Hope I Get Old Before I Die Why rock stars never retire, from the bestselling author of Abbey Road
Philippa Langley on The Princes in the Tower
The sleuth who tracked down the body of Richard III tackles another mystery TO BOOK TICKETS email reservations@theoldie.co.uk or call Katherine on 01225 427311 (Mon-Fri 9.30am-3pm). The price is £85 for a three-course lunch including wine or soft drinks l Vegetarian options available on advance request l Meet the speakers from 12 noon; lunch at 1pm l Authors speak 2.30pm
Town Mouse
My son’s saviour? A Victorian banker
tom hodgkinson
Our Young Mouse is only 25, but is far better with money than his slightly feckless dad.
He announced a few months ago that he’d saved up enough money to leave the family nest and buy his own flat in west London. ‘It’s shared ownership,’ he said. ‘You buy a quarter of it and rent the rest.’
I sounded a note of fatherly caution. ‘Isn’t that where you get those horrible service charges?’ I asked.
I’d read an article about the huge costs of shared-ownership schemes. ‘And who is running this scheme?’ I asked.
‘Something called Peabody,’ he replied.
At the mention of Peabody, concerns evaporated. George Peabody (1795-1869) was the philanthropic American banker who founded the Peabody Trust, a prime example of Victorian social housing that really worked.
We consulted Granny Mouse and Grandfather Mouse. They both have some expertise in property. Grandfather Mouse was a protégé of Harold Samuel, who founded property empire Land Securities in the 1940s. Granny Mouse has what she calls a ‘property empire’, consisting of a one-bed flat in Shepherd’s Bush and a studio in Oxford.
They both approved of Young Mouse’s
plan, because the Peabody name just seems so trustworthy and good.
George Peabody, who lived in London, retired in 1864 with a fortune of £2 million (£200 million today), largely derived from lending to US states and large companies. He set up his eponymous housing trust with a gift of £150,000 in 1862.
The Trust built blocks of flats in central London and moved the poor out of Dickensian slums. Peabody’s aim, he said, was to ‘ameliorate the condition of the poor and needy of this great metropolis, and to promote their comfort and happiness’.
The poor and needy had to be deserving sort: there were rules such as night-time curfews and prompt payment of rent.
The trustees promised ‘the construction of such improved dwellings for the poor as may combine in the utmost possible degree the essentials of healthfulness, comfort, social enjoyment, and economy’.
In this they were successful. The FT describes his buildings, designed by architect H A Darbishire, as ‘handsome, well-built barrack-like tenements, many of which would sell for a fortune if they were on the market today’.
They’re not exactly beautiful but are determinedly low-rise – and they still stand, in contrast to many later
developments, since knocked down.
A similar project is the Guinness Partnership, which used its vast beer fortunes to invest in social housing. It was founded in 1890 when Sir Edward Cecil Guinness gave £200,000 to set up the Guinness Trust.
The Guinness Partnership thrives today and runs homes for more than 160,000 people. It’s a century since Guinness, now Lord Iveagh, bought Kenwood House in London and two years later gave it to the nation, with its extraordinary picture collection.
The Peabody Trust in London, which now owns more than 100,000 flats and houses, was not Peabody’s only philanthropic venture. In the US, he left $3 million to fund the Peabody Fund for the Advancement of Education in the South. This included a school for teachers in Nashville, Tennessee.
Nor were they his only legacy: in 1854, he took on a young partner, Junius Spencer Morgan, father of JP.
Peabody was one of the founders of modern capitalism, yet he also tried to help the people who were arguably rendered poor by the system. And the criteria for buying a Peabody flat are admirably conceived, excluding, as they do, serious capitalists.
You must have an income in the £35,000-to-£80,000 bracket. You must not already own property. You must be local. It must be your first purchase.
Through these rules, speculators are kept out and the flats are sold to those who need them and also can afford them.
Feckless freelance layabouts such as me would have been detected and excluded by the moralistic overseers at Peabody. But Young Mouse fitted the bill brilliantly, being a hard-working lad with prospects.
Shared ownership scemes have been criticised for short leases. Young Mouse’s flat has a nice long lease of 250 years
He made his application, got a mortgage, passed all the tests and now lives in a lovely brand-new one-bedroom flat on the fifth floor of a purpose-built block. It has its own laundry room and a roof terrace, planted with herbs. The whole deal costs him far less than renting an equivalent place though a conventional landlord.
So Young Mouse has brilliantly avoided the terrible fate that befalls most young people in London: being stuck in an absurdly overpriced and grotty house-share for years, giving all your cash to a greedy landlord.
And it’s all thanks to George Peabody, the capitalist who helped people escape the brutalities of the open market.
Country Mouse
Sickness of the Sycamore Two
giles wood
Yet another thoughtful piece in the Sunday papers about the Sycamore Gap atrocity.
The incident impacted me less than others because my whole lifetime has been more or less in lockstep with the story of global environmental degradation.
I remember being glued, in the 1980s, to a Sunday newspaper account of Amazon rainforest destruction in Rondônia – and the anomaly that, in the background, my parents were arguing about whose fault it was we had run out of horseradish sauce.
And who was going to get in the car for a four-mile round trip to buy said condiment for the Sunday joint?
‘Ecological wounds’, to borrow Aldo Leopold’s memorable phrase, have been stalking me ever since boyhood, when a godparent gave me Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. I don’t know if I can even face watching Oldie pin-up Sir David Attenborough’s latest cry for help, Ocean.
I know my late mother had to stop watching him – ‘Too upsetting, darling.’
So the Sycamore Gap was only one in
a long litany of horrors that have besmirched this country since the Industrial Revolution. The reason the image resonated with so many novice ecologists – and even headlined on CNN – was perhaps collective Western guilt.
The view of the tree must have been ‘selfie’ heaven. I need to explore Northumbria, along with the operas of Havergal Brian. It’s allegedly a county that has gone unmolested by overdevelopment and still retains some wildness to offset our over-manicured southern-lowland landscapes. If the tree had hiked there itself, it could not have chosen a more picturesque spot.
I wager that most of the sycamore mourners will have got their basic knowledge of trees from the film of The Lord of the Rings and Tolkien’s Ents, to be precise – giant, ancient trees which can uproot themselves to muster an army to come to the aid of men and hobbits, to vanquish the forces of darkness.
This reminds me of Alan Garner’s modern day ‘wizard of Alderley Edge’, Cadellin. He waits in his cave with his armed band of sleeping knights to save
this country from its darkest hour. Actually, this is the darkest hour, and surely the moment to drive ‘numbnuts’ Starmer and co into the sea.
The sycamore thrives in the north and in agreeable groupings on bleak coastal farms in Anglesey. It’s a godsend to the landscape artist in areas where little else will grow. A simple blob of Hooker’s Green oil paint will suffice. But let us not forget the sycamore’s relatively recent introduction from Europe to this country, in the 15th century.
Smarmy southerners such as John Evelyn (1620-1706) would banish this tree from all ‘curious gardens’, pleasure grounds and avenues. London is full of sycamores. In the days when cars could be parked there, owners would return to find them coated with the noxious mucilage produced from the overly fecund tree.
The general reporting of the Sycamore Gap tree-felling incident was woeful for its lack of English history or tree lore, on both the BBC and ITN. It never fails to surprise me how de-natured our society is; how one sweatshirt-clad, loaferwearing polytechnic ecologist after another was paraded before the cameras to point out how important the tree had been to wildlife, our mental health and – dread word – ecosystem services.
Had I been in charge of news reporting, unblemished by a university education or a left-wing liberal bias, I would have got actor Toby Jones to dress up as William Blake and stand before the felled tree in period costume as the camera panned in on his anguished face.
We would switch to the churlish tree-feller Adam Carruthers protesting in bewilderment, ‘It was just a tree!’
Cue Toby Jones gesturing and quoting Blake:
‘The Tree, which moves some to tears of joy, is in the eyes of others only a green thing which stands in the way. Some see nature as all ridicule and deformity. And some scarce see nature at all. But, by the eyes of a man of imagination, nature is imagination itself.’
The two culprits, Daniel Graham and Carruthers, are waiting to be sentenced. in July. Ten years should give pause to ‘copycat’ criminals. Ten years inside will give the offenders time, when they are not slopping out or taking drugs delivered by drones, to read up on tree lore and tree law.
Northern actor/writer Stephen Graham happens to be a dead ringer for tree-feller Carruthers. Even now, Netflix might be approaching him to produce a drama to shed some light on what toxic cultural soup produced these monsters.
RIP the Sycamore Gap tree
Dame Edna, my dream boss
Sixty years ago, Mary Kenny was the adoring secretary of Edna O’Brien, star of a new documentary
A picture of the King is displayed in every British Embassy. But in Ireland’s London embassy, there proudly hangs a portrait of the world’s most famous Irishwoman, the novelist Edna O’Brien (1930-2024).
Edna, the unacknowledged Queen of Ireland, is the subject of a new, acclaimed documentary film, The Blue Road, produced by James Bond mogul Barbara Broccoli. It includes last interviews with the great lady as she approached death, last July, aged 93.
Barbara B has been in love with Edna since her schooldays – just like everyone else. When I once ventured a mildly critical view of Edna’s early novels (beguilingly written, I suggested, but essentially chick lit), I was told, fiercely, that I was just jealous.
it was a priest, Father Peter Connolly, who defended her when local women in County Clare called her a trollop (more jealousy!)
In 1965, I was, for a short time, Edna’s secretary and she was a generous, indulgent and warm-hearted person.
Of course I’m jealous! Here’s an honorary dame with talent, beauty, sex appeal, personal letters from Beckett, Pinter, Ted Hughes and Saul Bellow, the admiration of Richard Burton, Jackie Kennedy and Marlon Brando, and a night of romance with Robert Mitchum!
Edna’s life is now an epic and a legend – from simple country lass, rebelling against her primitive and reactionary family, a narrow church and repressive state, to the glossy celebrity of a cosmopolitan, arty life in London and New York, where she was adored by all.
As with all legends, there’s an element of fable. It’s claimed that Edna was seen as a pariah in Ireland at the start of her career. Not quite: the Irish media treated Edna as a star from the 1960s onwards.
Barbara B seems to believe the claim Edna’s books were burned by priests. But exhaustive researches, published in the Irish Times, have found no evidence for this.
In her own memoir, Edna recalls that
She was hopeless with money. She always fell for bad boys. Her rough peasant father proved to be correct about the man she chose to marry, Ernest Gébler (1914-98), who put her through humiliation, a horrible divorce and a wretched custody battle. She had a soft spot for the IRA cause, and compared Gerry Adams to ‘a medieval monk’. She was an intensely fond mother. She was a devotee of champagne and, even on her deathbed, told a friend, ‘Prosecco is the enemy.’ When Barbara Broccoli heard Prosecco was on the menu at her memorial service, she promptly got some Bollinger in.
People are fascinated by Edna’s life because of its epic storyline, but to her, it was her work that counted. And, although I didn’t always appreciate the themes of the novels, I came to see that her short stories are among the best ever written, collected in a volume titled The Love Object
The applause is deserved.
The Duchess of Sussex tells us one of her favourite hobbies is mah-jong. How delightfully retro! I hear it’s also popular in France.
Mah-jong appears frequently in Somerset Maugham stories of the 1930s, especially those set in the Malay states. These fretful tea-planters and unhappy wives are brought together with a session of mah-jong (and bridge).
A mah-jong revival satisfies my theory that everything eventually comes back into fashion.
Some American states have restored the firing squad as a means of delivering the death penalty – including South Carolina, Oklahoma and Mormonish Utah.
I don’t favour capital punishment but, if it legally exists, the firing squad must count as the most dignified dispatch. It also absolves any one individual of being executioner, since no shooter knows who fired the fatal bullet.
There’s an Irish ballad that extols the valour of death by firing squad: ‘Shoot me like a soldier, do not hang me like a dog.’
I’ve been influenced – again – by Marlene Dietrich, playing a Mata Hari figure facing the firing squad in Josef von Sternberg’s movie Dishonored (1931). Dietrich coolly applies her lipstick, as the commanding officer offers her a blindfold to shield her from the guns. She takes the bandana and slowly wipes the tears from his eyes.
Rather more momentous than being strapped to a prosaic gurney for a euthanasia injection.
To mark this summer commemorating the end of Second World War, a friend took me to the Battle of Britain Memorial site at Capel-le-Ferne, between Dover and Folkestone.
For a location which recalls war’s turbulence, it’s a strikingly peaceful environment: a wide green space atop those white cliffs overlooking the Channel, theatre of all that aerial combat.
On a plain wall are inscribed the names of those young men who gave their lives in the crucial battle that halted the invasion of these islands.
A bench nearby memorialises one squadron leader, Richard McQuillan, who survived, with his radio call, ‘Over Dover, Over.’
Three words expressing the joy of return on a wing and a prayer.
Small World
Cupid strikes in a tatty tourist shop
My heart-throb fell for my stalking routine amid the kiss-me-quick hats
jem clarke
Jem Clarke is in his mid-fifties, is five foot zero inches tall and has never left the family home in Cleethorpes, which he shares with his parents…
I need a break. But I don’t know how to ‘break’ any more.
With a key family member ill (hello, Mother), every day feels like wartime. Nonetheless, holiday we must – or, rather, holiday I must.
Father does not get time off and is on an endless loop of domestic duties that would make a 19th-century scullery maid wince. I barely recognise him without an unhealthy pile of ladies’ undergarments in his tentative grasp.
Because of my father’s poor eyesight and my tiny hands, he’s more laundry and light lunch.
I am on top of all Mother’s microrequirements: replacing hearing-aid batteries in her pointless hearing aids; writing ‘roast beef’ on the outside of transparent Tupperware that clearly contains roast beef; and wardrobe adjustments (stretching jumper material over her hunch, attaching pinafores over Norris-McWhirter-troubling breasts).
So I leave father folding sundries and then alphabetising them according to colour, under Mother’s latest Trumpian decree. And I scarper into the sun.
But there isn’t much respite to be had on the streets of Cleethorpes. Because it’s the smallest of the ‘no-one-ever-leaves’ towns, every third step I bump into someone asking how my mother is. All I want to do is walk uninterrupted around the promenade, looking at flocks of seagulls or sucking on a stick of rock.
But, thanks to the Greek chorus, I can’t escape. The seagulls seem to flock into the outline shape of a giant misshapen brassière. The caramel rock, streaked with suspicious yellow, puts me in mind of Mum’s well-travelled teeth.
A stranded seal’s ragged honk is a dead match for Mother’s ‘day-snoring’.
The only thing that swerves my attention is the appearance of a friend’s fantastic ex-fiancée in the sub-post office.
I’m slightly enamoured with ‘Ms Distraction’. I once consoled her after my
evil friend abandoned her for a travel agent he met while putting a deposit on their never-to-be honeymoon.
All I can come up with is ‘I’m only buying a mechanical pencil’, followed by ‘Hello’, followed by ‘I’m Jem’, which she barely reciprocates with a ‘I know’.
Half an hour later, I find her by accident – not design – in a touristy bazaar I thought would be beneath her.
She is classy and often ‘just back from Turkey’. But there she is, amid the kiss-me-quick hats and gorilla masks. Now she is warmer towards me, saying, ‘I’m buying some knock-off crocs.’
All a romance-ready me had to do was double down with some footwear talk, and I might have rekindled our barely burning vague acquaintance.
Instead, remembering she’s a teacher, I blurt out, ‘Have you seen that Adolescence show on TV? Aren’t boys twats these days?’
I float home – a slightly single woman finds me amusing
She shivers and holds several size-six plastic shoes tighter to her chest, as a shield from my bad chat.
One hour ten minutes later, she walks into a tea shop I’m already in. But she doesn’t notice me. Now I’m terrified she’ll think I’ve followed her, when in fact she is the follower and I am the rightful resident.
I can’t stand the Hitchcockian tension. I charge to her table, shouting, ‘Just to make it clear, I’m not stalking you!’
I walk away and then walk back, adding, ‘But that’s what a stalker would say, wouldn’t they?’
A little socially awkward, despite her classical beautiful face, she halfwhispers, ‘You make stalking funny … if stalking can be funny.’
I float home, on the idea that a slightly single woman in a too-small town may find me partially amusing. In these dog days, it’s enough.
Once home, I open the living-room door like a man renewed and boast, only half joking, ‘I think I’m in love.’
Father says, ‘I think I’ve filed the green knickers under olive again.’
History
Bloody-minded Magna Carta
Let’s have a new national day, celebrating the Great Charter
david horspool
St George’s Day usually passes (on 23rd April, in case you missed it) without much fanfare – apart from the laments of newspaper columnists that it is passing without much fanfare.
Every year, the English are compared unfavourably, usually by themselves, with celebrants of the other home nations and their ostensibly more appropriate saints.
This is hardly fair. The apostle Andrew had as much to do with Scotland as the martyr St George had to do with England, while Patrick was (whisper it) probably Welsh. His first encounter with the Irish was when he was enslaved by pirates from Ireland, according to his memoir (the Confessio).
St David, Dewi Sant, is the only one of the home nations’ patron saints who could have been picked for his country’s football team (perhaps rugby, in David’s case).
Alternative candidates for England’s patron saint have been suggested – including a convincing case made for St Edmund, in the The Oldie by William Cook. That ninth-century Anglo-Saxon king martyr is certainly a better bet than the semi-mythical Cappadocian George.
denominations can be insulted – nor can the religious atheist, always ready to take offence at the vestiges of Christianity in our public life.
A non-saint’s national day could be an occasion for encouraging British unity, rather than British division. This would have the virtue, for those who value the union, of encouraging support for it without encroaching on individual nationalist sensibilities.
I’ve got just the day: 15th June. All the patron saints’ days – David and Patrick in March, George in April, Andrew in November – fall in the colder months. Beer-garden drinks, village fêtes, barbecues and street parties are all better suited to summer. Why 15th June?
King John signs Magna Carta, 15th June 1215
But getting the English to adopt another saint may be a stretch in these godless times.
Instead of an alternative saint, why not take a leaf out of France’s book and choose a secular day for celebration?
For the French, 14th July is a much bigger deal than the saints’ days of either of their patrons St Joan or St Denis.
There are many advantages. No followers of other religions or different
Because on that day two momentous events in British history took place. The first was at Runnymede, a meadow in Surrey, in 1215.
There, King John sealed what we know as Magna Carta, submitting royal power to the rule of law, conceding rights that we still rely on today. When a Daily Telegraph headline warns (as it did earlier this year) that ‘justice delayed is justice denied’, it is invoking Magna Carta.
Clause 40 of the original charter, one of three still on the statute book, promises ‘to no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice’.
Admittedly, our court system is currently making King John look like a model of efficient judicial practice, but we owe the principle to Magna Carta.
Medieval historians will tell you
Magna Carta was being breached before the royal seal had dried on the parchment, but the fact that John repudiated it didn’t kill it off.
Its afterlife in the reigns of his successors and its rediscovery at the time of the Civil Wars ensured that a bargaining chip from the Middle Ages became a universal symbol of individual rights and the limits of arbitrary power.
A lost 1300 issue of the charter has just turned up at Harvard. Bought for $27.50 in 1946 as a supposed copy, it’s worth over £10m.
Magna Carta didn’t figure much in the events of another historic 15th June. That was in 1381, at the culmination of the Peasants’ Revolt. On 15th June, King John’s descendant Richard II met another group of rebellious subjects –this time in Smithfield in London.
The barons who imposed Magna Carta on John could call on the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, to back their cause. The peasants, led by Wat Tyler, had murdered their Archbishop of Canterbury, Simon Sudbury, in 1381. Tyler, finding himself in the extraordinary position of talking on equal terms to his king, fell victim to William Walworth, Lord Mayor of London, who stabbed him to death.
It may not be a salubrious historical moment, but it’s certainly a resonant one, from which you can take any number of lessons. Absolute power and unfair taxes should be challenged, on the one hand – or, on the other, threats to order and terror on the streets of London should be met with an iron fist.
Why should the French have the monopoly on celebrating their spirit of rebellion?
This 15th June, let’s raise a glass to enduring British bloody-mindedness –and all the good it has done.
David Horspool is author of The English Rebel
Great war stories
WWII inspired Evelyn Waugh, Anthony Powell and Olivia Manning
a n wilson
The coming of VE Day and VJ Day each year is always poignant.
The numbers who took part in the fighting, and who still survive, have diminished to a heroic few. The numbers of books about the Second World War, however, continue to swell. Most of these books, in so far as I’ve sampled them, are stultifyingly boring and badly written.
Indeed, I know only one true masterpiece, written in English, about the war – Alan Clark’s Barbarossa: The Russian-German Conflict, 1941-45 (1965). Whereas his earlier book The Donkeys destroyed the reputation of the British top brass in the First World War and, in its caustic analysis of the battles on the Western Front, inspired the musical Oh! What a Lovely War, Barbarossa is not about Britain at all.
It describes two truly magnificent armies. In its sense of the sheer dreadfulness of what they underwent, it bears comparison almost to The Iliad itself.
Clark was one of the few who kept alive the reputation of the poet Keith Douglas (1920-44), killed at 24 on the beaches nine miles south of Bayeux on 9th June 1945.
His understated and clever poetry is probably the best ‘war poetry’ written by anyone on active service, in that conflict – though, of course, T S Eliot was in London during the Blitz and did duty in the fire service.
That inspired much of the fiery imagery of ‘Little Gidding’, and the unforgettable scene of a London street, totally deserted after a bombing raid, and after the German plane had flown home: After the dark dove with the flickering tongue/ Had passed below the horizon of his homing…
Douglas and Eliot are certainly better poets than most of those associated with the First World War. I’d be happy never to read again Siegfried Sassoon’s rhyme about everyone suddenly bursting out singing.
Am I alone in being unimpressed by the maudlin and not very skilful Wilfred Owen, with his clunkingly obvious verses about dwelling on the corpses of the young ? As for Rupert Brooke’s one corner of a foreign field being forever England, I’m afraid that’s a ‘Pass the sick bag’ one in my book.
Nevertheless, it is interesting to dwell on the two world wars and the literature they did, and did not, inspire.
One reason the Second World War did not inspire even the kitsch rhymesters of the Edward Thomas or Siegfried Sassoon level is that many of the writers, such as W H Auden and Christopher Isherwood, had skedaddled, rather than doing anything so risky as to fight for their country.
Poor old Mrs Auden, the poet’s mum, was neighbour to some friends of mine during the war and would assure them, with pathetic implausibility, ‘Wystan’s in America, but I believe he’s doing wonderful work for the allies’.
Still, for those writers who were prepared to ‘do their bit’, it hoicked them out of their cushy ruts and routines and offered them a whole new set of experiences.
Two of the best novelists of the 1930s, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell, would still have left behind them an impressive body of work had they been killed in action in 1940. But Waugh’s Brideshead and his Sword of Honour trilogy are surely among the best things he wrote, if not the best.
As for Powell, whenever I reread A Dance to the Music of Time, finished 50 years ago, as his great-granddaughter Hope Coke writes in this issue, it strikes
If my generation had been shaken up by war, we might have written better books
me that the three novels set in the war are the best of the sequence.
Unlike Waugh, who fought in Crete, Powell had the experience of very many servicemen – of ‘active’ service being pretty boring and inconsequential.
What his three war novels convey so convincingly is the effect the war has on everyone – from the civilians who live through the Blitz or, as in the case of Lady Molly and pals, die in it, to the Welsh bank manager, Gwatkin, who is dreaming heroic dreams, in part inspired by a boyhood reading of Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill. Those who accuse Powell of being such a snob that he interested himself only in the upper classes or London bohemia overlook the sympathy and accuracy with which he depicts Gwatkin, Corporal Gwylt or the alcoholic Bithel running the mobile laundry.
If my generation had been shaken up by a war, we might have written better books – though they might have been not so much inspired by active service as simply, as Powell did, soaking up the atmosphere of wartime.
Good as Powell and Waugh are, their books as war stories are not as impressive as the work of one who never saw active service. In The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy, Olivia Manning (190880) wrote six short novels that nearly stand comparison with War and Peace. Her protagonists Guy and Harriet Pringle work for the British Council in Bucharest before the war, and then, with relentless German successes, push their way into the Balkans and North Africa and are able to take ship to Egypt.
The Egyptian novels in the sequence are quite extraordinary, given the fact that Manning never fought in a battle.
The pathos and excitement of living through the war, and having no power to dictate its fortunes, are conveyed by Manning quite magnificently.
Death can hardly fail to be uppermost in people’s minds – with Good Friday and its liturgical account of Jesus’s terrible death on the cross only a few weeks ago; and the thousands being killed every day in the dreadful wars by which we are surrounded; and the death of Pope Francis on Easter Monday.
sister teresa keswick
Death becomes him
Seeing the Pope only hours before he died being greeted by cheering tens of thousands in St Peter’s Square brought out some very mixed reactions and emotions.
Pope Francis (19362025), Easter Day
He was there against the advice of his doctors – admirable and very brave of him, and wonderful that he showed such strong independence of spirit right up to the very end.
What sprang to my mind were the words near the conclusion of John’s Gospel: ‘I tell you most solemnly, when you were young you put on your own belt and walked where you liked; but when
you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and somebody else will put a belt round you and take you where you would rather not go.’
How many of us would choose, let alone consent, to being driven round so publicly when we are so close to our end? And is it right? I know for various reasons that I would not want this to happen to me.
However, modern society has become far too squeamish about death, and too often condemns the dying to invisibility in the wards of hospices and hospitals. This can’t be right: there is so much to be learnt from being with the dying, not least an awareness of our own vulnerability.
But at the same time death is an intensely private matter: something that no one else can do for us.
Ultimately, death, with its final closing
Memorial Service
of the door, happens to us when we are totally alone.
Pope Francis’s independence of spirit showed itself in a splendid denial of convention when he went out onto the balcony overlooking St Peter’s Square just after he had been elected.
Inside the room, a Vatican official approached him with a magnificent golden and bejewelled cope. He refused to have it put on him, saying, ‘The carnival is over,’ and went out to greet the vast crowds dressed in a plain white cassock.
This very early statement in his papacy showed Pope Francis to be a man who meant business, and who had no interest in grand trappings.
He was a controversial figure, not least because of his directness in forcibly expressing what he thought wrong: in general, our wanton destruction of the planet; and in particular the excessive gossiping taking place in Vatican circles.
His warmth and his capacity to listen to ordinary people will surely guarantee him a place in many hearts.
Marianne Faithfull (1946-2025)
A memorial service for the singer Marianne Faithfull was held at St Mary’s Church in Aldworth, the Berkshire village where Marianne’s late mother, Baroness Erisso, lived. Marianne was buried immediately afterwards, next to her mother, in the churchyard.
Ringo Starr, Bob Geldof and Kate Moss attended. Keith Richards and Marianne Faithfull’s ex-boyfriend Mick Jagger sent flowers.
The service was conducted by the Rev Grant Fensome, the Church of England vicar, assisted by Father Tom Montgomery, a Catholic priest who often visited Marianne in her last years. She was brought up as a Catholic.
A musical tribute was played by rock singer Nick Cave, Warren Ellis, Ed Harcourt and Rob McVey.
The organist was Richard Ingrams, former editor of Private Eye and founding father of The Oldie, who has
As tears go by: Marianne Faithfull
lived in Aldworth for many years and often plays the organ in the church. Richard Ingrams played ‘Jerusalem’ and ‘Abide with Me’.
Father Tom Montgomery gave the address. Marianne’s son, Nicholas Dunbar, gave the eulogy. Marianne’s granddaughter, Eliza Dunbar, sang Handel’s ‘He Shall Feed His Flock’.
The congregation heard recordings by Marianne Faithfull of ‘The Gypsy Faerie Queen’ and ‘She Moved Through the Fair’. Oscar Dunbar, her grandson, performed ‘Love Is’, composed by him and his grandmother.
Father Tom Montgomery read Matthew 11:25-30, ‘Come to me, all who labour and are heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.’ The congregation said the Lord’s Prayer.
JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW
The Doctor’s Surgery
Monday, Monday – so good to me
Is it really better to be operated on at the start of the week?
dr theodore dalrymple
It is easier to start a health scare than to end one. Likewise, it’s easier to raise public anxieties than to calm them.
Perhaps the clearest example is the worldwide panic over the alleged link between the MMR vaccine and childhood autism. No matter how many times the original research is shown to have been faulty to the point of fraud, a residue of suspicion remains in the public mind – to damaging effect.
Recently, I saw a headline, ‘Don’t have surgery on Friday’. This was to draw the public’s attention to a statistical study of 429,691 adult patients in Ontario. Between 2007 and 2019, they underwent surgery either on Friday or on Monday.
Taking population statistics into account, this suggests that, in 13 years, citizens of Ontario, and no doubt those of many other provinces or countries, stand a roughly one-in-20 chance of having an operation performed on them either on Friday or on Monday.
The authors of the study found that those patients who had their operations on Fridays had a roughly five-per-cent increase in an index comprising rates of complication, readmission to hospital and death, compared with patients who had their operations on Mondays.
This difference persisted after a number of variables were controlled for. Hence the headline ‘Don’t have surgery on Friday’: a warning that might well insinuate itself into the public mind. After all, why risk avoidable death?
However, there is relative risk and absolute risk. I examined the death-rate figures more closely.
I found that, if the 199,744 patients who had their operations on Friday had had their operations on Monday instead, 20 of them would have avoided death in the first 30 days post-operatively.
That is, if the increased death rate of those who had their operations on Friday were entirely attributable to the fact that
their operations were on Friday rather than on Monday, which is doubtful.
But, even if true, it would amount only to a one-in-10,000 chance of dying because of having an operation on Friday.
I noticed something peculiar about the death rates. The relative difference in the death rates between those who had their operations on Friday and on Monday increased with the passage of time. It was greater at 90 days than at 30, and greater at a year than at 90 days.
It struck me as implausible (though not quite impossible) that this could be accounted for by the day of the week on which the operations were performed.
It seems more likely that there was undiscovered difference in the patients whose operations were performed on Fridays and on Mondays.
What are we to do with such results?
It is possible that a wild goose chase will be set off, searching for an explanation and suggestive of expensive remedies –such as increased staffing levels of hospitals at weekends.
I am not against this, of course, but it is likely that health economists will object. They might find that any improvement in results was bought at too dear a cost, and the money would be better spent on something else.
If fear of having an operation on Friday became general, and people started to refuse such operations because of their worse outcomes, it might lead to congestion on other days, and therefore to more deaths, as people demanded an operation on any other day than a Friday.
To tell patients that the additional chance of death because of having an operation on Friday is one in 10,000 is not likely to cut much ice with them.
No one says, ‘What if I am one of the 9,999 who survive?’
Superstition – all the more when supposedly backed by science –dies hard.
A friend of mine in New York was able to have his operation sooner than he might otherwise have had it because he accepted an appointment on Friday the 13th, which many others had refused.
‘Hell is other angels’
I Once Met Eric Morecambe
In June 1974, I was regional manager of a TV-rental company and had just completed an inspection of the Harpenden branch.
The branch manager and showroom manageress were experienced and competent. Consequently my visit had gone well, leaving time for pleasant socialising in the showroom before the lunch break and my next inspection in the afternoon.
Suddenly, the manageress exclaimed, ‘Oh, I think it’s Eric Morecambe.’
Sure enough, it was. He walked towards the showroom in an immaculate blazer and flannels. He quickly realised he had an attentive audience.
On arriving outside the showroom, he immediately went into a comic performance. First, he stood on one foot and then he lifted the other leg in an imitation of the Harry Worth mirror sketch. Harry was another comedian of that time, with his own very popular series.
This was followed by Eric’s own inimitable routine: the eyebrow multi raising, the rictus smiles and liberal use of his spectacles. He had his small audience of three in the palm of his hand. He waved goodbye and continued his
the satisfaction he had in giving us so much enjoyment.
In 1946, aged 12, I began to board at a convent school in Rutland.
My classmates were future debutantes. Academic achievements were neither expected nor desired.
The curriculum focused entirely on literature and history of the ‘right sort’. Namely, celebrating Bloody Mary as a heroine of her age and Good Queen Bess as an illegitimate usurper in league with the devil. The aspiration was that we would all marry Catholic peers.
walk through the town, where he lived for many years until his death in 1984 – aged only 58.
At the time, he was still at the height of his and Ernie Wise’s popularity and fame. He gave us a few minutes of enormous pleasure. I have always felt our appreciation was more than equalled by
He was a lovely man, whose humour was never malicious or politically motivated. He will always remain in my thoughts because of those few minutes of joy he gave the three of us – just as he gave to so many and still does to the millions of viewers who watch his and Ernie’s shows.
David Blundell
My vision of Hell – a North Sea riptide
As with all the girls, my faith was quasi-fanatical. What we lacked in balanced education we made up for in religious fervour.
During my first summer at the convent, the nuns took us to the Norfolk coast as a treat.
I bolted straight from the bus to the sea. After a few minutes of blissfully treading water, I stretched my legs to steady myself and walk back to play with the other girls.
It was only when I turned to face the shore that I realised a rip tide had swept me far out into the North Sea.
I began to panic, beating my legs against the water, desperately trying to swim back to a shoreline I could no longer see. Huge waves crashed around me – and my panic soon gave way to terror.
I was going to drown. Much worse than that, I was going to Hell.
I had missed Sunday Mass and the only thought spinning around my head was that if I died, my soul was condemned for eternity.
I pleaded with God and promised I would become a nun if he rescued me. At the very last moment, two lifeguards did just that.
Back on the beach, I quickly forgot all thoughts of Hell (and the rash bargain I had made). I was one of three girls swept out to sea that day. Only two of us were rescued.
As the years went by, my feverish faith turned to simple belief until, eventually, it lapsed entirely. However, even as the agnostic I am
today, I will never argue against religion.
I adored my Catholic girlhood. I found the spiritual comforts of my youth far superior to any worldly relief I found later in life.
But I will never miss that fear I had as a girl. Hell has certainly outlived its usefulness – if indeed it had any.
In an age where churches are being turned into luxury flats, pubs or even nightclubs, if priests want to fill their pews, they should scratch Hell out of all sermons once and for all.
By Anne Carey, London W8, who
receives £50
Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past
Morecambe at home, Hertfordshire, 1971
The Oldie, 23–31 Great Titchfield Street, London, W1W 7PA letters@theoldie.co.uk
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Ranch dressing down
SIR: Prue Leith’s article on Australia’s outback and brothels (Prue’s News, Spring issue) left nothing to the imagination, but in relating her trip to the mining town of Kalgoorlie, the article suddenly moved Australia from one continent to another!
Australia does not have ‘ranches’: that is the prerogative of the USA.
Thanking you,
Marjorie Brown, Glenunga, Australia
In Cary Grant’s shoes
SIR: David Greenway recounts (‘Generous Grant’, Spring issue) that Cary Grant was attired in immaculate black tie and carpet slippers. Cary’s footwear would have been expensive dress slippers as worn by many male stars at the time, including Clark Gable. Fashion labels are promoting them once again, although they’re now no longer tied to formal wear.
I’ve dined with a duke who was proudly sporting his late father’s very tatty but also very ornate dress slippers. Michael Sheehan, Horncastle, Lincolnshire
RAF in Vietnam
SIR: The Old Un’s Notes (May issue) refer to the fall of Saigon 50 years ago. The item goes on to mention the British Advisory Administrative Mission in South Vietnam during the conflict, with the
‘Oh, you must come and meet Graham and Amanda –they’ve still got a landline, too’
suggestion that a covert UK Special Forces mission, possibly as early as 1962, was the only British military involvement.
That is not quite correct: in February 1966, a Royal Air Force Beverley transport undertook three flights in South Vietnam ‘in order to help with the distribution of relief and welfare supplies provided by various charitable organisations’ (Hansard, 10th May 1966, MoD PUS Merlyn Rees MP, Labour, in answer to a question from Victor Goodhew MP, Conservative backbencher).
In the same answer, Rees stated, ‘In addition, certain British military aircraft stage in Vietnam on their way between Singapore and Hong Kong. For shortand medium-range aircraft, there is no suitable alternative.’
Michael Fortescue, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire
Hitler met Schiele
SIR: ‘ What if?’ is the substance of ‘When Hitler met Freud’ (by Maurice Gran, May issue). I too have imagined a circumstance that might have altered history.
What if, when he applied to the School of Arts and Crafts in Vienna in 1907, Hitler had got a place and had met the sixteen-year-old enfant terrible of the Viennese art world, Egon Schiele? What if these two angry young men had become friends?
What if Hitler had been content to learn how to paint or even study architecture? What if he, like Schiele, had been mown down in the flu epidemic of 1918? What if…?
Les Burton, Reepham, Norfolk
Odd couple: Hitler and Freud
We didn’t remember them
SIR: I read with interest Major General Julian Buczacki’s reflections on VE Day (May issue), but what he did not mention is how recent are these celebrations of wartime events. When I was a schoolboy in Essex in the 1940s and ’50s, if you had asked me or any of my school friends what were the dates of D Day, VE Day or VJ Day, I doubt any of us could have named them. They were simply not mentioned and not celebrated.
We marked Remembrance Day on 11th November as it was more or less compulsory to do so, and then (in the ’60s, I think) that commemoration was moved to the nearest Sunday.
It seems to me that the further we get from the war, the fewer people there are with any experience of it; and the smaller the armed forces have become, the greater seems the government’s need for these memorials. A narrative is being constructed that these are sacred dates that have always been celebrated. It is simply not true; the generation who actually lived through the war certainly did not celebrate them. Owen Wells, Ilkley, West Yorkshire
Will Hay’s magic
SIR: Roger Lewis, in his review (May issue) of When the Carry On Stopped by Dave Ainsworth, quotes the author as stating that the Carry Ons were ‘the greatest and most successful comedy series that British cinema produced’. They were certainly the longest and most successful, but surely not the greatest! To say that you’d have to
overlook the Will Hay films, the Ben Travers farce adaptations and original screenplays, the Boulting Brothers’ ‘satires’ and, rivalling the Carry Ons in cheapness, the vehicles of Arthur Lucan (Old Mother Riley) and Frank Randle.
The Carry On people certainly missed a trick. They should have spoofed the Ken Russell films with Carry On Composer Mark Newell, Surbiton, Surrey
Down with skool
SIR: I’m always amused and enlightened by Sophia Waugh’s observations on school life.
Her recent piece ‘I’m a teacher – not a prison guard’ (May issue) about her colleague taking the worst ‘offenders’ on an extracurricular trip to a prison, in the hope of changing their challenging behaviour, was another insightful commentary.
However, I couldn’t help thinking that there may be a large portion of the school population who actually see school itself as a prison!
It is somewhere they are forced to attend, where they have to move from one subject area to another on the hour, where they have to raise their hand to speak (and even ask permission to visit the loo!) and where they often have to wear suffocating ties and jackets.
And when they are released from custody at the end of the day, they have more school work to do.
Failure to comply with any of the above can lead to their sentence being extended with a period in detention!
Regards,
John Rattigan, Doveridge, Derbyshire
‘You’re late for your interview, Harris. That’s a good start’
Keep one eye on the road
SIR: Mary Kenny questioned oldies quitting driving (Postcards from the Edge, May issue). She mentioned losing her confidence and was told by Tomás O’Callaghan, ‘Age is not a barrier; ageism is a prejudice.’
I was born with no sight in my left eye. Recently diagnosed with Parkinson’s, I informed the DVLA. I was told to stop driving. Not because of my Parkinson’s but because I could see with only one eye.
I have been driving in West Africa as well as the UK with one eye since I was given my UK licence in 1968, 53 years ago. I am appealing – not just to my wife! Miller Caldwell, Dumfries, Scotland
Music for the brain
SIR: Mary Kenny (May issue) says that her driving adviser states that ‘driving a vehicle is the highest cognitive challenge to the human brain’. Well, he should try playing the church organ (and possibly with choir and conductor), which one neurologist has described as being ‘theoretically impossible’.
‘He used to run a gallery. It’s how he’d want to exit’
However, it is at least true that you are less likely to die following such a pursuit (it has happened), or kill anyone else for that matter.
Regards, Geoffrey Atkinson (organist for more than 65 years, and still at it), Banchory, Aberdeenshire
God bless the Constitution
SIR: Your ‘Canadian Trump Fan’ (Letters, May issue) observed that those who are alarmed by what he calls Trump’s ‘national democratic revolution’ are fighting back through the justice system. Of course they are. That’s what it’s for. Look at the Constitution!
Stephen Halliday, Cambridge
Prime of Mrs Spark
ROBIN BAIRD-SMITH
Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark
By Frances Wilson Bloomsbury
Circus £25
I was Muriel Spark’s publisher at Constable for ten years.
I had learnt from Alan Maclean, the publishing director (not just ‘an editor’, as Wilson refers to him) at Macmillan, that Spark (1918-2006) had fallen out with his publishing house. I learnt, too, that she’d moved to the Bodley Head, where her editor James Michie, she later told me, never answered her messages or phone calls and where her sales had declined alarmingly.
I was already publishing some of Spark’s short stories in Winter’s Tales, an annual collection I edited. Nevertheless, it was with great trepidation that I went to Italy to meet her to lure her onto my list. She described herself as ‘Lucrezia Borgia in trousers’.
But I was lucky. I was the only publisher Muriel never fell out with or dismissed.
In the last sentence of Frances Wilson’s preface, she says that while ‘Muriel Spark is no longer here to score through my sentences’, that does not mean ‘I have not felt, on every page of this book, the control of her hand’.
This sounds like the first sentence of a Muriel Spark novel. And, indeed, Frances Wilson shows real perception and understanding of her subject – more than can be found in any other critical book published so far.
Wilson’s technique is to offer us a kind of slide show. Vivid accounts of aspects of Spark’s life alternate with probing investigations of influences behind many
of her greatest novels. In the process, both are greatly illuminated.
Wilson’s description of the 1930s Edinburgh of Spark’s childhood, with her outstanding teacher Christina Kay later enshrined for the ages as Jean Brodie, is atmospheric and compelling. Although the detail is at times a little oppressive, the pace soon accelerates and we are launched into the world of literary London.
Spark had the capacity to be
extraordinarily venomous. In the best of her later novels, A Far Cry from Kensington (1988), which I published, she took her revenge on her former lover and literary collaborator Derek Stanford. She could not forgive him for having sold her love letters at auction, along with other papers.
In this fictional reworking of their relationship, Stanford memorably becomes the pisseur de copie, the irredeemably second-rate hack who had
Muriel Spark – and Maggie Smith in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1969)
literary pretensions that could never be fulfilled.
Other victims of her venom included Spark’s son, Robin, with whom she engaged in a public dispute about the issue of Muriel’s Jewishness.
Poor, saintly and endlessly patient Alan Maclean, the publisher who had launched her career as a novelist, was subject to a vitriolic attack in a lengthy memorandum (a legal deposition), itemising his failings.
I have a copy of this document and find myself trembling as I read it.
Wilson rightly emphasises the importance of Muriel Spark’s conversion to the Roman Catholic Church, but is unable to find any answer to why Spark took this step.
I once asked Spark that question directly. She replied that becoming a Catholic was the one thing that stopped her going mad. I understood this to mean that Catholicism contained her.
She inhabited a place that was of this and other worlds and she was aware of the conjunction of opposites – not least when it came to good and evil.
This conjunction was very real to her. It could not be obliterated and was part of her creative drive and brilliance.
Wilson concludes correctly that describing emotion was not one of Muriel’s gifts as a novelist. In a sense, she was a modern metaphysical, constantly wrestling on the page with intellectual and theological ideas.
We had intended to publicise A Far Cry from Kensington with a discussion of the book on BBC television. Invited to participate with Spark were A J Ayer, A N Wilson and Piers Paul Read.
I went to her hotel in St James’s to collect her and take her to the studio. When I arrived, the hall porter handed me a fax from Muriel, which read, ‘Arrived at Boulogne-sur-Mer. Decided to go home. Do not bother to contact me.’
The wily operator had done a disappearing act and returned to the Tuscan hills.
This episode immediately became a news story after I relayed it to the London Evening Standard, and sales of the new novel rocketed to a level Muriel had not achieved for a long time.
Wilson quotes someone as saying that nothing in Spark’s life happened that was not intended to happen. Wilson captures this aspect of her artistry better than anyone else.
Robin Baird-Smith was Muriel Spark’s publisher
Deep waters
PATRICK BARKHAM
Is a River Alive?
By Robert Macfarlane Hamish Hamilton £25
Perilously close to the rapidly expanding suburbs of Cambridge is a modest spring in a small wood.
In the drought-stricken summer of 2022, Robert Macfarlane walked to the 12,000-year-old upwelling and found it choked and rank with leaves, with no discernible flow.
‘Has the water died?’ asked his nine-year-old son.
We’re familiar with talk of dying rivers in Britain; less comfortable with the idea that a river is alive.
Each year, official statistics reveal increasing outpourings of sewage into our 40,000 waterbodies. For centuries, we’ve treated rivers as a ‘limitless source and limitless sump’ – an object, used to help us prosper. We’ve pushed them to their limits.
Is a River Alive? is a journey to three watersheds – the gold-mine-threatened cloud forests of Ecuador, the toxic waterways of Chennai and a hydromenaced river in Canada – to shed the rationalism that teaches us that a river is not a form of life.
What happens if we take the idea that a river is alive seriously, as the indigenous-inspired Rights of Nature movement asks us to? How could this shift transform our destructive relationship with the planet?
These earnest questions are posed by a public intellectual firmly established as this century’s leading British non-fiction writer. Macfarlane has become an influential voice also across North America and Europe.
That might suggest a serious, heavygoing treatise, but this gripping adventure is gloriously enjoyable; poetic, profound and tightly plotted.
As he journeys through Ecuador, Macfarlane’s vivid snapshots of places and people bring us with him. He spots ‘dogs asleep in the gutters, undisturbed by the tyres that thunder a few inches past their dream-twitching noses’, and house martins weaving in the air above a security guard ‘cradling his assault rifle like a baby’.
A middle-class white man questing for indigenous wisdom is fraught with neo-colonial hazards, and Macfarlane is hyper-aware of such risks.
His outward-looking quest gives full voice to human and non-human collaborators. And Macfarlane is present
less as authority figure and more as attentive student, often undercutting himself with humour.
In Ecuador, one expedition partner, Giuliana Furci, a ‘hardcore mycologist’, mocks his interest in birds while revealing her own uncanny ability to detect rare fungi. Bigger-than-rational, bigger-than-Robert forces are at work.
Macfarlane’s journey to Chennai, once a Victorian fantasy of an Indian Venice, leans on – and is lit up by – Yuvan Aves, a youthful Indian polymath, writer, teacher and activist.
Macfarlane is guided to understand how cities grow up along riversides, forget their ecological genesis and then risk collapsing under their own weight. Chennai built itself on marshland; its floods turn catastrophic because it no longer makes space for water.
Macfarlane bears witness to Ennore Creek and the Kosasthalaiyar river, where water blisters human skin and the air stings mouths. Radioactive fly ash from power station chimneys sets into a jelly-like substance which local children use as a trampoline, imbibing loose fly ash as they bounce. And yet flashes of beauty endure: ‘Swallows sit like musical notes on the staves of telephone wires.’
Macfarlane admits his optimism deserts him in this wasteland; local activists are less daunted. Hope is embodied by Aves, who survived domestic violence and yet somehow brims with respect for all life.
Finally, he goes to Canada for a rip-roaring adventure, kayaking the whitewaters of the Mutehekau Shipu or Magpie – a river menaced by ‘hungry corporate eyes’, hoping to monetise its flow via hydroelectric dams.
Before Macfarlane sets out with his all-male expedition team, he meets Innu poet and activist Rita Mestokosho. She was instrumental in the campaign to recognise the Mutehekau Shipu as a living, rights-bearing being. Rita’s gaze is ‘a LiDAR scan of the soul’. In Macfarlane, ‘she sees a man who lives too much
in his head’. He’s told he must seek just one question that the river will answer.
Macfarlane endures aching limbs, blinding migraines and deep fear on what is a mythic pilgrimage – a physical trial in the wilderness to attain a great insight.
His closing discovery, as he feels himself merging with his environment, is more feminine than is traditional, perhaps, and all the better for that: an ‘intensifying feeling of somehow growing-together with the river: not thinking with it, but being thought by it’.
So many formidable intellectuals end up embracing mystical patterns of thinking: there must be something in it!
‘Somehow, we need to find new kinds of imaging; new ways of being that will leave us less alone in this world,’ thinks Macfarlane. For that, we need ‘a great reach outward of mind and imagination’.
This generous, barnstorming, virtuoso masterpiece of storytelling is exactly that.
Patrick Barkham is The Oldie’s Taking a Walk correspondent
Wild Bill Buckley
CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD
Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America
By Sam Tanenhaus
Random
House £33
To adapt Winston Churchill, the American conservative journalist and commentator William F Buckley (19252008) was an immodest man who had much to be immodest about.
‘I am, I fully grant, a phenomenon,’ said Buckley, born 100 years ago, on 24th November 1925. ‘But not because of any haste in composition. I asked myself the other day, “Who else, on so many issues, has been right so much of the time?” I couldn’t think of anyone.’
It’s a bold claim, but consider the facts. In a 65-year-long career, Buckley turned out literally thousands of newspaper articles, founded the still thriving National Review magazine and hosted the American television hour Firing Line for 1,054 episodes over 33 years. It was the longest-running such public-affairs show in TV history, and made for often compelling viewing.
Apart from anything else, Buckley was blessed with both a mellifluous voice that always sounded as if he took it out and let it marinate in a cask of port in between appearances, and an extensive Latinate vocabulary.
There was his posture, too: a nearly
horizontal slouch that combined an air of patrician languor with that of a coiled snake.
Firing Line was totally unrehearsed, relying solely on the quick wits of Buckley and his chosen guest for its dramatic effect. British readers need only think of Michael Parkinson crossed with a touch of Jeremy Paxman at his most waspish to get some of the flavour.
Buckley combined all this with careers as a concert-level harpsichordist, trans-oceanic sailor, prize-winning novelist and good-natured loser in a 1965 New York mayoral race, where he polled a respectable 15 per cent of the votes and thrilled all sides with his silver-tongued oratory.
Somehow he always managed to present an image that crossed the sophistication of a pedigree Crufts champion with the more direct approach of a Rottweiler attaching itself to an opponent’s windpipe.
‘Now listen, you queer. Stop calling me a crypto-Nazi or I’ll sock you in your goddamned face, and you’ll stay plastered,’ Buckley famously informed the novelist Gore Vidal during their televised debate at the 1968 Democratic national convention in Chicago, thus somewhat abandoning his reputation for high-minded discourse. The men later sued each other for libel.
Was Buckley always right? Not entirely. In 1957, he wrote a National Review editorial he entitled ‘Why the South Must Prevail’, in which he declared whites to be, ‘for the time being, the most advanced’ of the races and, as such, the most fit to govern.
A number of Buckley’s critics accused him of using fancy language to dress up some pretty unattractive opinions. ‘My position on segregation is that it is morally wrong if it expresses or implies any invidious view of a race; not so if it intends or implies no such thing,’ he wrote in 1964.
In later years, Buckley came to modify these views, remarking that it would take legislation by the federal government, and not just the good nature of the country’s whites, to level the playing field between the races.
Sam Tanenhaus, a former editor of the New York Times Book Review, has written a long and well-researched book on his subject.
His biography was apparently 20 years in the making, and it shows in the sheer amount of detail – not only about Buckley’s often combative public life, but also about his relationships with friends and family, his various aches and pains and his travels.
‘Your old school just called – they’d like you to give a talk to the pupils on underachieving’
There is a gripping account of Buckley’s brief but colourful early career as an undercover CIA agent in Mexico City in the early 1950s that reads like the plot of a melodramatic James Bond film as interpreted by Woody Allen.
Buckley’s station chief was none other than E Howard Hunt who, 20 years later, helped hatch the Watergate burglary for the Richard Nixon administration. Some of that tragicomic event’s origins can clearly be seen in the Buckley-Hunt partnership in Mexico.
Apart from looks, charm, breeding and a coruscatingly witty style with both the written and the spoken word, Buckley’s defining quality was his Stakhanovite productivity.
In 1983, he even wrote an entire 90,000-word book, called Overdrive, covering the events of a single week of his life. Buckley was 58 at the time, and kept to a schedule that would have taxed the energy of a man half his age.
Indeed he literally never stopped, dying at 82 from a heart attack at his home in Connecticut, while sitting at his desk writing yet another article.
Sam Tanenhaus doesn’t endorse every aspect of his subject’s life, but he is fair and readable.
Anyone who wants more should move on to Buckley’s own memoir, Miles Gone By: A Literary Autobiography, or watch one of the classic Firing Line episodes on YouTube.
Christopher Sandford is author of 1964: The Year the Swinging Sixties Began
Up Pompeii
JOHN DAVIE
The Buried City: Unearthing the Real Pompeii By Gabriel Zuchtriegel
Hodder Press £22
Pompeii is perhaps the most famous archaeological site in the world. And Gabriel Zuchtriegel, author of this
superb book, is the German Director General of the site.
It’s a time capsule of a thriving provincial city. Captivating works of art jostle with everyday life’s remnants, from cooking utensils to bakeries and beds in brothels – all frozen or, more accurately, fried in time, from that late morning on an autumn day in 79 AD when Hell was unleashed on the unsuspecting citizens.
Vesuvius literally exploded from the pressure that would no longer be contained under the earth’s crust. The resultant pyroclastic waves, between 200°C and 300°C, which swept across the immediate landscape, brought sudden death to all Pompeii’s residents.
Pliny the Younger witnessed the disaster as a teenager, from a safe distance. He describes in two letters how his uncle Pliny the Elder – the polymath author of the Natural History, who was then in charge of the imperial fleet stationed at nearby Misenum – met his end through suffocation after a failed attempt to rescue a friend.
Gabriel Zuchtriegel leaves us in no doubt about the horror of this cataclysmic event. With considerable modesty, he explains how he became Director General of the Archaeological Park in Pompeii after presiding over excavations at Paestum.
His predecessor, Massimo Osanna, had set the bar high. For Dr Zuchtriegel, who studied classical archaeology at the Humboldt University in Berlin, his new appointment is, first and foremost, ‘a privilege’. Pompeii and its hidden treasures are lucky to have him.
Reading his book, the best that I have read so far on Pompeii, is a breath of fresh air. Rightly criticising some archaeological approaches as dry and excessively factual, he nails his colours to the mast from the outset by stating that one of the most important by-products of studying antiquity is learning what antiquity says about us today.
With each new page, it becomes clear that archaeology is a passion for the author. What interests him most is what buildings can tell us about how people lived their lives.
He sees the eruption of Vesuvius as ‘a unique opportunity for modern archaeology to plunge into the ancient world’, describing this as ‘the Pompeii effect’.
He approaches the task entrusted to him by the Italian Ministry of Culture with the vision of an architect as much as an archaeologist. He always pictures the people behind the remains, both at the time of the eruption as they sat
in the streets, heads in hands, and in the days of prosperity before, when life was good in this prosperous corner of fertile Campania.
Everyday life fascinates him and he succeeds completely in making us share his enthusiasm.
The Villa of the Mysteries, which fortunately survived the 170 bombs that fell on Pompeii in the Second World War, has long fascinated scholars. Dr Zuchtriegel, in a gripping chapter called ‘Captivating Rituals’, examines its frieze, with the god Dionysus and Ariadne enthroned at the centre.
Although the topic is Dionysian, the women should be seen, he says, not as mystic celebrants, but as part of a treatment of the theme of marriage, from the perspective of the bride. That’s a view proposed by a German scholar of the early-20th century, Margarete Bieber.
He considers how we underestimate the importance of ritual in our modern understanding of the art of early societies, as art and religion have long since gone their separate ways.
Pompeii is the gift that keeps on giving. New finds are constantly appearing. In 2017, there was the sensational discovery of a beautifully executed mural of an unclothed woman, Leda, and a swan (the lusty god Zeus, in animal form) about to mate with her. The result of this union will be the most beautiful woman in Greece, Helen, who launched a thousand ships to fight the Trojan War.
Sex is everywhere in Pompeii, its walls full of attendant Cupids. As the author puts it, ‘If a mythological wall painting in Pompeii is devoid of erotic content, then it’s an exception.’
Many of these erotic murals were removed in the 18th and early-19th centuries, as there was no way of conserving the frescoes in situ.
Dr Zuchtriegel says that preserving wall paintings is one of the greatest challenges he faces.
‘Did I say “vulture”? I meant “property developer”. What about you?’
This book is a continuation of what the author calls an early rebellion against ‘a whitewashed picture of classical antiquity’.
He succeeds admirably.
John Davie was Head of Classics at St Paul’s and a lecturer at Trinity College, Oxford. He co-wrote Et Tu, Brute? The Best Latin Lines Ever
Club class
THOMAS W HODGKINSON
London Clubland: A Companion for the Curious
By Seth Alexander Thévoz Robinson £25
I have never belonged to a London club.
But … I trained for swimming the Hellespont at the Lansdowne Club. I was accused of being an emotional vampire at the Chelsea Arts Club.
And I was advised by my father in the smoking room at Annabel’s, shortly before my first marriage, to ‘just stop’.
I celebrated my 21st birthday at Brooks’s. I wrote a screenplay (which was never filmed) in the Hurlingham Club. Once a month at the Academy Club, I judged a poetry competition, into which I invariably submitted a hopeful entry under the pseudonym Janice Novaya.
I say this not to boast. Or, at least, that’s not my only motivation. It’s also because I think the main readership for this book will be people who have some familiarity with London clubs. Like filmgoers who read the reviews after a trip to the cinema, they will want to check their own experience against the verdicts of the author.
In my case, I was pleased to see that Auberon Waugh, for whom I used to work, was rightly credited with the creation of the Academy Club. I hadn’t had any idea that the Chelsea Arts Club was the brainchild of James Whistler. And I was dismayed that Brooks’s snooker table hadn’t reached the list of clubs offering a snooker room.
By then, though, I was enjoying the ride. The first half of London Clubland is a competent compendium. Each of 140 clubs gets an entry, from the old ones such as Brooks’s to newer ones such as the Groucho. This section also includes the odd eccentric outlier, such as the Yeoman Warders Club, which operates within the Tower of London and is open solely to Beefeaters.
There’s wit as well as clarity in the way these entries are done. Alongside a
‘short history’, each has a sentence on ‘what they want you to know’ and ‘what they probably don’t’.
Boodle’s wants to you to know they were Ian Fleming’s club, but not that a member once shot himself in the billiard room.
Buck’s wants you to know they invented Buck’s Fizz, but not that Margaret Thatcher was a member.
The Special Forces Club, which has many members in the intelligence services, wants you to know … nothing.
The second section, devoted to ‘Club Culture’, is more hit-and-miss. An academic historian, who is personally and professionally preoccupied with clubs, Seth Alexander Thévoz writes pretty sensibly as he takes us through 48 subsections such as ‘Feuds’ and ‘Subscriptions explained’.
Occasionally, though, he lets the mask of sanity slip. When he declares that anyone wearing red trousers is an ‘onanist’, for example, it’s hard to disagree. But I can’t help thinking the same could be said of anyone using the word ‘onanist’.
There’s some relatively racy stuff here. We find a whole section devoted to ‘Clubs That Stephen Fry Has Apologised To for Taking Drugs In’.
One of the highlights of the book is its selections from the clubs’ betting books. At Brooks’s in the late-18th century, Lord Cholmondeley bet Lord Derby roughly £100,000 (in today’s money) that he would at some point ‘fuck a woman in a balloon one thousand yards from the earth’. This mind-boggling wager was later called off, it seems by mutual consent.
A drug-addled Stephen Fry? Offcolour bets? Combine this with the scathing social-stereotype descriptions in the section entitled ‘Clubhouse Types’ –which include The Pedant and The Bored Middle Manager – and you’re left wondering: why would anyone want to join a place that brought them into contact with such people?
I put this question to a friend of mine, who belongs to at least one London club. His reply: ‘Deep waters… Status, love, companionship, the possibility of gay sex. The usual.’ Which was funny of him, but not wholly misleading, at least in its mention of status.
Part of the appeal is related to Groucho Marx’s observation that he would never belong to a club that would have him. Put it another way: people want to join private members clubs because it’s hard.
My personal hunch is that the appeal
of the older clubs also lies in their recreation of the public-school experience. When the old boy relaxes in the library, surrounded by other old boys, he feels young again.
It reminds me of Lord Curzon, who created a room at his home at Kedleston Hall that was an exact replica of his room at Eton. He used to sit in it and weep.
Thomas W Hodgkinson is author of How to Sound Cultured
Planet Plantagenet
CLAUDIA
GOLD
Sceptred Isle: A New History of the Fourteenth Century
By Helen Carr Hutchinson Heinemann £25
In August 1151, Henry, Duke of Normandy, swept into Paris to pay homage to his overlord, King Louis VII of France.
Henry, who was also a likely candidate for the English throne through his mother, Matilda FitzEmpress, secured far more than just a duchy during his few days in Paris. He convinced Louis’s queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, to divorce her husband and marry him instead.
This marriage, which followed in May 1152, brought Henry, and then the crown of England, the immense wealth and land of Aquitaine – nearly one-third the size of modern France.
Henry and Eleanor’s descendants, particularly Edward III and Richard II, would be haunted by the diminishment of their inheritance of Aquitaine.
It was this desire of the later Plantagenet kings to regain the land in France that had once been theirs that added to the woes of the almost incomparably horrific 14th century.
Helen Carr’s new book aims to capture this turbulent period.
Helen Carr has excellent credentials. The great-granddaughter of the giant of historiography E H Carr, she has co-edited a follow-up edition to his influential What Is History? Her biography of John of Gaunt was wellreceived. Yet, in Sceptred Isle, she misses the mark.
Carr undertakes a formidable task. By invoking Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century at the outset, she immediately places herself in contrast to one of the greatest historians and story-tellers of the modern age.
While Carr writes particularly well on
‘Can I get your opinion on this and then express outrage at your response?’
Scotland, and John of Gaunt, and her chapters on the Black Death are poignant and heartbreaking, the book feels incomplete and too narrowly focused.
Her central flaw is her parochial view of English history. Though the book is about England, it does not adequately place the country within the broader European context.
Of the apocalyptic horsemen that stalked this calamitous century – in Tuchman’s words, ‘plague, war, taxes, brigandage, bad government, insurrection, and schism in the Church’ – there is little, other than a few pages of scant analysis.
The Avignon Papacy is mentioned, but with no context. The removal of the Papacy from Rome to Avignon (where it was widely known as the Babylonian Exile) had terrible consequences.
It placed it firmly in the pocket of the French king, and precipitated the corruption and decadence that ravaged the church throughout the 14th century.
Carr offers little character development, even of her main subjects. The biting wit and humour of Piers Gaveston, surely the most colourful of the royal favourites, is absent.
There is far too little on the women.
On Isabella’s tumultuous diplomatic mission to France in 1314, there is nothing. Throughout the book, Carr fails to give us enough on the character and motivations of Edward II’s queen.
In 1314, on a diplomatic mission to France on behalf of her husband, Isabella witnessed the burning at the stake of the once immensely powerful Grand Master of the Knights Templar, Jacques de Molay (her godfather), ordered by her father.
During this eventful trip, she also denounced two of her sisters-in-law for adultery. Was Isabella, as early as 1314, manoeuvring for her son, the future Edward III, to inherit the French throne as well as the English?
It was this hope, particularly the desire to reconquer all of Aquitaine, that led to so much misery in England, as Edward III doggedly pursued what became known as the Hundred Years War. An exploration of these intriguing events and Isabella’s motives would have been welcome.
Likewise, Philippa of Hainault, Edward III’s queen, is mentioned only briefly in relation to her many pregnancies, despite her important role as a cultural patron who helped to advance the careers of writers such as Jean Froissart and Geoffrey Chaucer.
On Chaucer, Carr gives us very little. His relationship to the royal family through his wife’s sister Katherine Swynford (John of Gaunt’s mistress and third wife), his contributions to the English language and his role as a diplomat are all overlooked.
There was a reason some of the greatest writers of the 14th century – Chaucer, Petrarch, Boccaccio – were employed as diplomats but, again, Carr does not explore this further.
Frustratingly, her book does not adequately examine the intellectual and cultural climate of the time, which was undergoing significant change, particularly in the wake of the devastation of the Black Death.
Ultimately, Sceptred Isle feels like a missed opportunity. Carr’s narrow focus on the four English kings, combined with a limited broader historical context, leaves the book feeling incomplete.
For readers seeking a superb book about the 14th century, Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror remains the go-to recommendation.
However, if you’re looking for an engaging and accessible overview of the men who ruled England in the 14th century, Carr’s book will suffice.
Claudia Gold is author of King of the North Wind: The Life of Henry II in Five Acts
‘When two people love each other very much and their parents won’t stop nagging them about having kids...’
OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH
Double trouble
JASPER REES
Parallel Lines
By Edward St Aubyn Jonathan Cape £20
To pick up an unread novel is to knock on a door you’ve never been through. Who will open it? Will they welcome you in? Once you’ve crossed the threshold, might you want to turn round and head straight back out again?
On page one of Parallel Lines, Edward St Aubyn introduces Sebastian, who lives in a psychiatric unit. His mind is at the races, tripping over itself to free-associate, as he pays a rare and head-exploding visit to the countryside.
His kind of company can be quite hard work and Sebastian, who suffers from what he identifies as ‘delusional omnipotence’, is archetypal.
For contrast, there is Olivia, who lives in said countryside. Her mind is blessedly tidy and calm, despite a young mother’s first-world worries about having it all.
She suffers from ‘a pre-emptive nostalgia for the last days of [her son’s] early childhood, made even more precious by the trouble she had taken to miss out on them’. It helps to be knowing and unflappable when making, as Olivia is, a radio series about extinction events called Apocalypse.
No two characters could present a greater antithesis. And yet it is soon revealed that Sebastian and Olivia are twins, separated after birth and adopted into very different homes – his cruel, hers kind.
A half-clue is almost in the names, both being lifted, if not quite accurately, from Twelfth Night. (St Aubyn’s 2017 novel, Dunbar, updated King Lear to the boardroom.)
Chance has given these twins disparate trajectories. But there are signs that they are mentally aligned. Olivia can make swift, lateral leaps too. Asked by a waiter about allergies, she replies, ‘Boris Johnson and his predecessor.’
Not, for some reason, his successor, although the novel is bang up to date on other liberal talking points that come up whenever its characters chinwag, entertainingly, about big themes.
Reunited by their interfering, thoughtless birth mother, the twins soon discover they have an even more coincidental link: Olivia’s adoptive father, Martin, is Sebastian’s psychoanalyst.
This intriguing if implausible twist
places Martin in a knotty personal and professional bind that is a rare point of quickening tension.
Martin is not the only character in the novel to look in the mirror and see a good sort of person. His wife and son are also psychoanalysts. Olivia’s husband, Francis, is something big in the preservation of Peruvian forests, funded by eco-moneybags Hunter, who is also plunging capital into amortality research.
This will be too late for his wife, whose cancer is so far gone that she doesn’t have lunch. Hunter works through his compassion fatigue at an Italian monastery run by a saintly monk called Guido.
Halfway through the novel, St Aubyn’s cast converge on a gallery where an artist’s woozy walk-in installations are being unveiled. Sebastian, who doesn’t get out much, so fits in with this in-crowd that he is even mistaken for that most waffling of organisms, a critic.
As the talking cure and the meds work their magic, Sebastian grows on his twin, and on the reader, which is a blessed relief. What charms is his incisive, childlike rationality. When Olivia shows him her favourite Rembrandt, he is able to interpret its symbolism to her in a way that is revelatory and beautiful.
Sebastian’s only equal for clarity of thought is Olivia’s boy, Noah.
‘We’re here,’ says his mother at the end of a journey.
‘We’re always here,’ Noah harrumphs. ‘That’s what here means.’
He’s six, and quite as precocious as the two sons of Patrick Melrose encountered in At Last. At one point, Noah finds himself ‘struck afresh … by the acuity of his own mind’.
This is a novel about big things –the planet, the dinosaurs, the afterlife, the unconscious, plus the villainy of greenwashing – all filtered through a sensibility that at once admires and subverts the wonders of human intelligence.
Martin, being a shrink, is typically addicted to the dopamine hit of cleverness. ‘You do love an interpretation, don’t you, darling?’ his wife says.
‘I’m sorry,’ he replies. ‘I just can’t stop.’
Nor can St Aubyn in this subtly seditious tour of contemporary anxieties and its therapies, those non-identical twins forever seeking each other out in the perpetual dark.
Jasper Rees is author of Let’s Do It: The Authorised Biography of Victoria Wood
Some people regard discipline as a chore. For me, it is a kind of order that sets me free to fly.
Julie Andrews
The older one becomes, the quicker the present fades into sepia and the past looms up in glorious Technicolor.
Beryl Bainbridge
I’m one of those regular weird people.
Janis Joplin
The saddest thing I can imagine is to get used to luxury.
Charlie Chaplin
Books can be broadly broken into two classes: those written to please the reader and those written for the greater pleasure of the writer.
J K Galbraith
It is never too late to be what you might have been
George Eliot
If pigeons were as rare as nightingales, we would adore them.
Ronald Blythe
I am free of all prejudice. I hate everyone equally.
W C Fields
Stripping actors
Actors are increasingly pressurised to squander their lives honing themselves into states of implausible bodily perfection.
Commonplace Corner
If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.
Mark Twain
SOS LSD RSVP ELIZABETH
Telegram, asking for pounds, shillings and pence, from Lady Elizabeth BowesLyon (later the Queen Mother), then aged seven, to her father, the Earl of Strathmore
If the original of any of your characters would win a libel case against you, you have failed to create a real character.
John Braine
It’s no good pretending that any relationship has a future if your record
If the repercussions of #MeToo have spared women some of the indignities of display, male gym bunnies scampered in to fill the gap.
The T-shirt strains and bulges in all the approved places. Trousers cling, to the point of inconvenience. A costume exists only to be torn off, revealing yet
another Instagrammable, strangely sexless body, fit only for loveless
Love Island. The trim figure is part of theatre’s armoury. As Elizabethan boy actors were ogled, and Restoration actresses were fetishised, so our current crop of favourites are stalked and salivated over.
Sex should be only an appetiser at the theatrical feast; not the main course.
Audience concentration is a fragile thing. In the first dress rehearsal of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit in 1941, the actress Fay Compton had her evening gowns secretly severely lowered to emphasise her embonpoint.
Coward knew his play
collections disagree violently or if your favourite films wouldn’t even speak to each other if they met at a party.
Nick Hornby
I’m selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best
Marilyn Monroe
Those who dream by day are cognisant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
Edgar Allan Poe
Promise me you’ll never forget me because if I thought you would, I’d never leave.
A A Milne
Silent films were more effective for Laurel and Hardy, but the sound was of great value in enhancing the effects. Dialogue eliminated a lot of action and sight gags. I always feel that action speaks louder than words.
Stan Laurel
Go to heaven for the climate and hell for the company.
Benjamin Franklin Wade
risked being upstaged by a plunging neckline and took instant remedial action.
‘And, as for you,’ he announced to the luckless star, ‘those tits must go.’ A moment of consideration.
‘Both of them.’
The décolletage was ditched and the play ran for a record 1,997 performances.
Vanity has become a
SMALL DELIGHTS
Having a week when all three bins need putting out – and remembering them all.
ROSS SAMPSON, EEMNES, HOLLAND
Email small delights to editorial@theoldie.co.uk
necessary, marketable virtue. The time lavished on CrossFit has not been spent in the library, the gallery, the live gig, the pub, the street, the bed, somebody else’s bed, somewhere, anywhere.
In performance, it shows, in a vacancy of voice, and an airbrushed standardisation of manner. Humanity lite. Mere impersonation.
No feast for hearts and heads, then; just a hastily grabbed sandwich from the chilled section.
Real humans in all their rumpled, decomposing glory are in danger of extinction on stage. Bring back those bad old bodies and the grit and glint that come only with that invaluable pursuit of life –some time misspent.
JASON MORRELL was in Mrs Brown (1997) and Wilde (1997)
Julie Andrews – she turns 90 on 1st October
FILM
HARRY MOUNT
RIEFENSTAHL (15)
Extremely talented people can also be extremely horrible.
That’s the feeling you get after watching Riefenstahl, a gripping documentary about the director Leni Riefenstahl (1902-2003), Hitler’s greatest film propagandist.
Her most famous films, Triumph of the Will (1935), about the 1934 Nuremberg rally, and Olympia (1938), about the 1936 Berlin Olympics, are technical triumphs –and grotesque paeans of praise to Hitler.
For the rest of her long life, Riefenstahl tried to maintain – in more than 50 libel cases – that she wasn’t a Nazi; that her films were essentially grand versions of only following orders.
This fair-minded film, directed and written by Andres Veiel, doesn’t let her off the hook – nor is it an out-and-out hit job. It coolly and convincingly shows you that Riefenstahl was deeply complicit with the Nazi regime, even if she was never an official Nazi Party member.
After the war, she was tried four times and declared to be a ‘fellow traveller’.
There is, thank God, only a tiny bit of
Arts
voice-over – and then only to fill in factual gaps. Instead, the case against Riefenstahl is carefully and fairly constructed from original footage and interviews and from her archive – 700 boxes of videotapes, documents and photos.
Riefenstahl always said she was only going along with most Germans in her support of Hitler. But in photos of her with Hitler and leading Nazis, her support looks pretty enthusiastic.
She certainly laid on the flattery with a trowel in her telegram to Hitler when he took Paris in 1940:
‘With indescribable joy, deeply moved and filled with burning gratitude, we share with you, my Führer, your and Germany’s greatest victory, the entry of German troops into Paris. You exceed anything human imagination has the power to conceive, achieving deeds without parallel in the history of mankind. How can we ever thank you?’
It’s one thing to follow orders; another to leap to obey them with such oleaginous fervour.
The film takes you carefully through Riefenstahl’s most notorious incidents.
In 1939, when she was a war correspondent, she asked for Jews to be removed from a market in Poland in 1939, leading to their execution. In wartime filming for Tiefland (1954), Riefenstahl used gypsies from internment camps, later sent to Auschwitz.
She always maintained she didn’t know they were sent to their deaths.
Riefenstahl’s familiar old claim –that she knew nothing about the horrors of the Holocaust – falls flat. Much flatter, in
fact, than the denials of her old friend Albert Speer, who crops up in extraordinary footage, strolling through the Alpine snow with Riefenstahl, both stylishly dressed and well-preserved, looking like a lovable pair of cuddly oldies.
Speer was a much better liar about his faked ignorance of the Holocaust. His self-effacing diffidence was a more effective mask for his evil than Riefenstahl’s touchy egomania.
Again and again, in postwar talk-show interviews, she flies off the handle whenever her Nazi sympathies are mentioned, shouting at the interviewer in a way that only screams ‘I’m lying!’ to the rooftops.
Like all crashing egomaniacs, she is happy only when surrounded by avowed fans, including the creepy Horst Kettner, who became her partner and propagandist when she was 60 and he was 20.
She adores her time with the Nuba people of Sudan in the 1970s. Again, she revealed her considerable technical talent in her pictures and film of their tribal rituals. But you can also see her self-indulgent delight when she says the Nuba have named their children – and a mountain – after her. And she orders them around as she photographs them with an air of cold, superior command.
Her egomania extends, like Nixon recording himself in the White House, to her recording her telephone calls from friends, including Albert Speer (whom she greedily consults about TV interview fees), and nasty fans – still Nazi sympathisers long after the war. The tapes were carefully filed away in her archive.
When one fan says to her that Germany will return to ‘morality, decency and virtue’ in two generations, she heartily agrees that ‘The German people are pre-destined for that.’
Je ne regrette rien might have been Riefenstahl’s motto – except for her regret that Hitler lost.
Fellow travellers: Riefenstahl and Hitler, 1937
THEATRE
WILLIAM COOK
ROMEO AND JULIET
Shakespeare’s Globe, London, until 2nd August
A Wild West Romeo and Juliet? It sounds like a terrible idea. I feared the worst for the Globe’s new rendition of Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy.
I needn’t have worried about the setting. The Wild West stuff actually works quite well. As always, it’s the story that’s the biggest problem.
Samuel Pepys said Romeo and Juliet was the worst play he’d ever seen. I wouldn’t go quite that far, but it’s surely Shakespeare’s worst denouement.
In case you’ve forgotten, a foolish Friar comes up with a cunning plan worthy of Blackadder’s Baldrick.
Give Juliet a sleeping potion that will make everyone think she’s dead, so she can wriggle out of her arranged marriage to a chinless chump called Paris. What could possibly go wrong?
Unfortunately, our silly Friar fails to inform Romeo of this fiendish scheme, so Romeo thinks Juliet really has died and consequently kills himself. Then Juliet wakes up and finds him dead, and kills herself. The end.
This convoluted finale is not only completely miserable, but also entirely implausible – and almost impossible to stage convincingly. No wonder 18th-century dramaturges rewrote it with a happy ending.
‘I had a lovely afternoon,’ said my wife as we left this matinée performance, ‘but I don’t think I’ll be watching Romeo and Juliet again.’
The main reason we had such a nice day out, in spite of the Bard’s inept plotting, is that the acting in this show is exceptionally good.
Jamie-Rose Monk was born to play Juliet’s nurse, a rumbustious role she inhabits absolutely. With her Cockney accent and clumsy bonhomie, you can picture her in EastEnders, pulling pints in the Queen Vic. Michael Elcock is a dynamic, charismatic Mercutio, the most appealing character in this drama. After he dies, just before the interval, the play never quite recovers.
Any Romeo and Juliet stands or falls on its two title roles, and in Rawaed Asde and Lola Shalam the Globe has found two rising stars. They’re both barely two years out of drama school, yet they tackle Shakespeare’s verse with a maturity that belies their relative inexperience.
It’s Shakespeare’s exquisite poetry that redeems his uneven love story, and
Asde and Shalam really get inside it. It’s no mean feat to elucidate his complex imagery; to give his intricate rhetoric the clarity and naturalism of normal speech. And yet they manage it – and so early in their careers!
Asde’s Romeo is a lovable scamp and Shalam’s Juliet is passionate and witty – a lot less passive and pliable than other Juliets I’ve seen. She doesn’t really look the part – despite her youth, she has the ample figure of a grown woman, not a girl of 13 – but that’s small beer beside the humanity and integrity she brings to the role. Asda’s cocky Romeo seems fickle by comparison.
So what about the Wild West theme? Why does it play so well, when I was sure it would be awful? Yes, there are a few Blazing Saddles moments, when the whole thing almost tips over into farce. There’s something intrinsically ridiculous about an Englishman in a stetson. But in the main it works, because the concept makes good sense.
The Montagues and Capulets are a
good fit for the feuding dynasties of the Old West, in a time and place in which deadly violence was endemic. As Shakespeare’s Friar observes, ‘Violent delights have violent ends.’
This gunslinging reboot also sheds fresh light on the personalities of Shakespeare’s ‘star-crossed lovers’. Juliet’s abandonment feels especially acute, in a locale we’ve seen in countless Westerns. Romeo shoots Tybalt in cold blood, giving Tybalt no chance to draw his gun. Is Romeo really one of the good guys? Juliet has known him for only three days. Can she really be in love with him?
Of course she can! For all its faults, Romeo and Juliet endures, not just because of the beauty of its verse, but above all because it recalls a time in all our lives when we were young enough and daft and brave enough to love another person utterly, completely.
Shakespeare’s Friar advises us to love moderately but, for the duration of this erudite, erratic play, we spurn his anaemic counsel. We dare to fall in
Parting is such sweet sorrow: Romeo (Abdul Sessay) and Juliet (Lola Shalam)
love again – recklessly, hopelessly, with no prenups or preconditions.
Rawaed Asde and Lola Shalam do what all the best Romeos and Juliets do to us. They remind us how it feels to be in love, and how it feels to be young.
RADIO VALERIE GROVE
News of the novelist Jane Gardam’s death, at 96, reminded me of my favourite Radio 4 play, based on Gardam’s short story The Tribute
An old nanny, Finch, known as Finchie, has died. She served five families in colonial days. None of the families ever paid her – ‘just her keep’ – but they entrusted her with their ghastly children, knowing she would bring them up to have nice manners and be kind.
As these comfortably-off ex-expat women pass round news of her death –‘Ate like a bird’; ‘She’d been in love once, but he was married’ – they hear there’s a niece who wants to meet them for lunch and give them some little mementos Finchie left. God! They grudgingly agree.
As they sit waiting in Harrods, memories flow back – including of one child, sweet Polly Knox, who once said, when there were six eggs to feed seven, ‘You can have half mine, Finchie.’
In Gabrielle Lloyd’s warm, economic script, the women – played by Lloyd herself, Margaret Tyzack and Julia McKenzie – betray their overblown sense of entitlement and cruel snobbisms. With equal economy, Polly (Rosalind Ayres) sweeps in late, orders champagne and reveals that, after all, Finchie had become rich: the man she loved left her a fortune! And she’s left half of it to Polly, who offered her the half-egg.
The snooty employers’ collective dismay is utter bliss to imagine. Great acting. Martin Jarvis directed. Repeat, please.
‘Warning: strong language throughout.’ It’s Radio 4’s Call Jonathan Pie (Tom Walker), but perhaps some cross Oldie-readers don’t appreciate it’s a spoof. When Pie’s work team goes round the table, answering the BBC’s obligatory DEI questionnaire about ‘their pronouns’, and Pie’s ‘otherness’ to LGBTQ+, Pie thinks it inane and mocks it by foul-mouthery: ‘The ancient Greeks never gave a toss – f**k who the f**k you wanted.’
It’s 60 years since a Punch cartoon showed a publisher across a desk from a lady author: ‘We like the plot, Miss Austen, but all this effing and blinding will have to go.’
Now everybody effs. Even saintly Miles Jupp, son of the manse, in his touring show.
Sadly, the sceptical challenge is vanishing in radio interviews. Young female authors, plugging their books’ on Woman’s Hour, all assume they discovered motherhood: ‘Nobody told me what it would be like.’
Really? ‘Wait a minute,’ you want to say. ‘Hadn’t you ever read anything on the subject?’
Then the Rev Pippa White explains to WH how she’d been a barmaid and it struck her, why not become a vicar? ‘So – yeah!’ said Pippa. She’d done a sort of course. It didn’t mean she’d had to ‘start wearing cardigans and spending evenings at home reading books’. And now she’s ‘the Rev’ and her TikTok following is in the millions because she’s ‘making religion fun’. No questions? This is what ‘unmoderated’ means.
The VE Day reportage, stuffed with wartime feats related by heroes, perhaps for the last time, included Patricia Owtram (The Oldie’s 2023 Secret Agent of the Year) singing along to Lili Marlene and going for oysters and champagne at Prunier.
Most talked-about was the late Queen’s account of descending from the balcony – ‘My mother had put her tiara on for the occasion’ – to mingle (at first with ATS cap pulled down over her eyes) in the crowds that day with her sister, and then conga-ing back to Buck House, to bed at 3am. Ultimate period piece.
TELEVISION
FRANCES WILSON
During his 50-year career as the most famous face on television, David Frost (1939-2013) recorded more than 10,000 interviews.
The first season of David Frost vs… (Sky Arts) focused on John Lennon and
Paul McCartney, Muhammad Ali and Jane Fonda. The interviews with Ali were the most arresting of the three episodes because Frost allowed the boxer a platform he was denied when his licence was suspended after his refusal to fight in Vietnam.
In one conversation, filmed before a studio audience, an argument about whether or not white people were the devil continued, with interviewer and interviewee both quoting from the Bible as the credits rolled.
In Frost’s final interview with Ali, the ex-world champion had Parkinson’s and his once beautiful voice was now inaudible.
Do you still believe, Frost asked him, that white people are the devil. No, Ali conceded – anyone, regardless of race and colour, can contain evil.
According to the publicity material, the aim of David Frost vs…, produced by Frost’s son Sky broadcaster Wilfred Frost, is to ‘unveil a fresh perspective on today through the battles of yesterday’.
This dubious claim is why the series is such a mishmash. The second season returns to Frost’s interviews with Richard Nixon, Elton John and key players in the Middle East conflict such as Moshe Dayan, Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin.
In the Nixon and Middle East episodes, Frost’s interviews are seen in the context of cultural and political events. Extensive footage diverts attention from the pointless contemporary commentary by retired politicians.
In 1968, Dayan tells Frost, ‘The most exciting event that can happen in life is
Oldie Secret Agent: Patricia Owtram
war.’ In 2025, Clinton and Blair tell the camera about their views on Israel and Palestine, while Wilfred Frost says how sad his dad would be about the resurgence of the conflict.
It is unclear whether this is a history lesson, a celebration of the interviewees or a celebration of Frost – about whom, his widow recalls, no one said a bad word. Frost’s likeability is fondly remembered throughout by Sarah Ferguson, Joanna Lumley, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton, with Lulu explaining that ‘It is because David was as famous as the people he was interviewing that you felt that he understood your life.’
‘What makes people tick fascinates me,’ Frost explains.
But what made Frost tick? Before he joined the Cambridge Footlights, he had considered becoming a striker for Nottingham Forest or a Billy Grahamstyle preacher.
If this were an in-depth character study rather than a hagiography, we would have less of Wilfred Frost’s admiration (‘That was MY DAD – that’s pretty cool!’) and more of Christopher Booker’s description of Frost as a ‘hollow man in pursuit of fame for its own sake’.
Or Kitty Muggeridge’s remark that, after That Was the Week That Was, when it was assumed Frost would disappear, he ‘rose without trace’. Or Jonathan Miller’s reference to ‘David f***ing Frost’.
Why, we might learn, did the man now described by his son as ‘the greatest broadcaster of all time’ host that fatuous
show Through the Keyhole, where panellists were given a video tour of a house before guessing which famous person lived there?
It is an odd choice to include the ten Elton John interviews. John Lennon talked to Frost about war, peace and prisons, but Elton can only talk pityingly about himself.
We watch him today watching the interview footage. ‘Those were the days,’ he says, admiring a jacket he was wearing in the eighties. Elton agreed to be interviewed by Frost, he now recalls, because Frost ‘could draw the best out of you’ and ‘was never intimidating. I trusted him.’ Their mutual blandness shines through.
The Nixon Interviews, filmed two years after the President resigned, has already been dramatised by Peter Morgan as the play Frost/Nixon, and turned into a film.
The footage is too well-known to surprise the viewer, but it is still good to hear Nixon tell Frost, after five days of filming, ‘I let down the country. I let the American people down and I have to carry that burden for the rest of my life.’
There is no exploration of why the interview worked. But according to Clive James, who reviewed The Nixon Interviews when they were first shown in 1977, ‘apart from the consideration that Frost is much nicer, the two are remarkably similar. They are both essentially role-players. At a level too deep for speech, they understand each other well.’
Michael Sheen, who played Frost in Frost/Nixon, makes the most insightful comment of the whole six hours: ‘David Frost is television.’
MUSIC
RICHARD OSBORNE
DECLINE AND FALL OF RADIO 3
On the Sunday the clocks went forward, Radio 3 devoted the day to the centenary of composer, conductor and selfappointed godfather of the post-1950s musical avant garde Pierre Boulez (1925-2016).
It turned out to be a thinly curated affair built round the network’s usual Sunday schedules. There were a couple of events live from the Barbican and a gem of an edition of Private Passions with scholar-composer Gerard McBurney, who’d worked with Boulez during his time with the Chicago Symphony.
But that was about it.
Eight days later, the BBC took a last decisive step in the dismantling of the old Third Programme/Radio 3 ethos – that marriage of intellectually impeccable speech programming with the high-end music and drama the network had been created to serve.
It was the non-music content that was now being dispatched. The network’s late-evening arts discussion programme Free Thinking was packed off, in reduced form, to Radio 4 (as if Radio 4 needed it).
Meanwhile, the Sunday evening play, one of the lynchpins of BBC radio drama, was unceremoniously axed.
The Donald isn’t the only subverter of those old postwar settlements that have served us so well down the years.
And there was more. That same week, the broadcasting regulator Ofcom announced that it would grant a full DAB licence to Unwind, the ‘mindfulness and well-being’ online stream launched by Radio 3 last autumn.
This latter-day river of forgetfulness deploys ‘meditative orchestral movements, gentle piano pieces, and
choral reflections’ to calm the mind and soothe the soul.
Put another way, it’s old-fashioned Muzak, reinvented to feed the needs of a health-obsessed – some might say, death-haunted – society.
Given that Unwind doesn’t inform, educate nor entertain, it should have no place in the schedules of our licence-feefunded national broadcaster. Yet it’s been ruthlessly promoted by the BBC with a barrage of prime-time radio and TV adverts. I’ve even heard ads before Radio 3’s own evening concert – a clear attempt to stop listeners from defecting to Classics FM’s similarly vacuous Relaxing Evenings
Brave souls who’ve sampled Unwind tell me that it’s averse to the on-air
Pierre Boulez (1925-2016)
Knockout: Frost vs Ali, 1978
naming of the music or its performers. It’s also obsessed with ‘natural sounds’, birdsong and the like.
But then Radio 3 Breakfast – a programme whose playlists are increasingly given over to music that advertises other Radio 3 programmes –is going down that track, too. Presenter Tom McKinney, Radio 3’s prince of hyperbole – we had ‘super-fascinating’ on Boulez Sunday – is similarly obsessed with birdsong.
One sign of a dying institution is that it’s either ignorant of its past or embarrassed by it. No broadcasting organisation, even in France, has a richer Boulez archive than the BBC, yet little of that was evident during the Boulez programmes.
I think of the legacy of former Radio 3 Controller John Drummond, whose friendship with Boulez stretched from Drummond’s time as a trainee TV producer in the early 1960s to his final year as Director of the Proms in 1995. Or his close ally, TV and film director Barrie Gavin, whose 1966 BBC2 film Pierre Boulez: Portrait, Analysis, Performance was the first in a succession of epochdefining documentaries about 20thcentury music which Gavin made over the next 40 years.
The day ended with a live performance of Pli selon pli, Boulez’s set of five ‘improvisations’ for soprano and orchestra on poems by Stéphane Mallarmé, a difficult enough poet even before Boulez got hold of him.
I remember Drummond recalling Barrie Gavin playing the second ‘improvisation’ over and over again in his office while preparing the 1966 documentary – an experience that had a profound bearing on Drummond’s own lifelong commitment to new music.
‘It’s not complexity that’s the problem with new music,’ he would say. ‘It’s unfamiliarity.’
From his mid-40s onwards, Boulez derived most of his influence and income from conducting elite orchestras (mainly American) and heading IRCAM, the lavishly funded computer-based music-research centre which President Georges Pompidou founded for him in the early 1970s.
As to Boulez’s wider cultural legacy, few have risked putting their heads above the parapet to point out how sterile much of it was. An exception was composer James MacMillan, in a magisterial deconstruction of the Boulez project in the November 2009 edition of Daniel
Johnson’s magazine Standpoint, precursor of The Critic
Most mainstream composers in the UK and USA simply ignored Boulez. Still, the likes of Dick DeBenedictis and Patrick Williams, creators of those weirdly disturbing soundtracks for my favourite detective series, Columbo, clearly learnt a trick or two from him.
GOLDEN OLDIES MARK ELLEN
WHEN COOL WAS HOT
Whatever happened to the idea of ‘cool’? Who was cool back in the day? Who’s cool today? And why does it now mean the opposite of what it used to?
For us ’60s teenagers, the coolest rock stars were a cut above the rest. They radiated a sense of effortless talent, devilmay-care nonchalance and a cavalier disregard for the establishment. They gave the (artfully engineered) impression that they put no thought or consideration into anything they did or said and just made it all up as they went along.
Jimi Hendrix was the epitome of cool – decadent, debauched, apparently living beyond the law in a series of impossibly chic military jackets. Bob Dylan, absurdly cool – detached, unknowable, brilliantly wrong-footing the irksome queries of media ‘squares’. The Doors’ Jim Morrison appeared to roll out of his satin sheets at the crack of noon, dress like Byron, and loaf about writing bacchanalian verse while flooring bottles of
‘This Wheel’s On Fire’, rarely gave interviews and floated around in a veil of silk scarves. And Bob Marley occupied another universe entirely, a herb-scented Shangri-La with its own religion and radical political agenda.
None seemed to crave commercial success. None courted publicity. None seemed eager to please.
Fast-forward 50 years and cool means something very different. It isn’t about being idiosyncratic or unreachable or against the grain. It’s about being conventional and successful. About fitting in.
Dave Grohl, leader of the stadiumfilling, hard-rock noisemakers Foo Fighters, is considered unimpeachably cool for being able to amass colossal wealth while still dressing like a cashstrapped student and remaining an approachable, glad-handing ‘regular guy’.
Taylor Swift’s coolness is based on much the same: her user-friendliness, the way she dresses like a hip auntie at a fancy-dress fairy party and her ability to date any fellow celebrity she fancies and then spill the beans about it in song. Her life’s an open book. A complete absence of mystery is a big part of the appeal.
Lady Gaga’s impeccable cool comes from her being a 21st-century renaissance woman – a nakedly ambitious effort to reach as many markets as possible as an artist, musician, entrepreneur, philanthropist and movie star.
Keeping their cool: Jim Morrison and
But the coolest pop star on the planet, by all accounts, is the 37-year-old Barbadian superstar Rihanna, despite the fact that she hasn’t released an album in nine years. She owes her universal admiration to the fact that she launched luxury fashion, beauty and cosmetics businesses now worth £2.8 billion.
And she owns half their value, making her the only female musician who’s a billionaire –thus by today’s mercantile metric, the coolest role model by a country mile. In fact, it’s all come full circle. When Rod Stewart released Atlantic Crossing in 1975 and made no bones about wanting to leave parochial Britain to make a killing in the States, his cool status was cancelled overnight. The fact that he’s playing Glastonbury this summer tells you it’s been reinstated.
EXHIBITIONS
HUON MALLALIEU
TURNER’S KINGDOM: BEAUTY, BIRDS AND BEASTS
Turner’s House until 10 October 23rd April is celebrated as the death day of St George and the birthday of both Shakespeare and J M W Turner, but none of these events is verifiable.
Turner (1775-1851) seems to have adopted the date, probably because it was close enough and he liked to be associated with the country’s patron saint. Still, it’s the right year to celebrate his 250th anniversary at his old home, Sandycombe Lodge in Twickenham.
Clockwise from above: Head of a Heron with a Fish, 1815. Goldfinch, 1815. Head of a Peacock, 1815. Head of a White Owl, 1815. All by J M W Turner (1775-1851)
The little house is a delight, but it can host only small exhibitions and comparatively few visitors at one time (booking is advisable: turnershouse.org). So ‘Turner’s Kingdom: Beauty, Birds and Beasts’ (until 26th October) is perfect for it. Few people have seen these glorious little watercolours made for his patron Fawkes of Farnley. To get so close to them is a privilege.
Although he was born above his father’s barber’s shop in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, Turner was at heart very much a countryman at heart. His mother’s family included a butcher –from whom he got his middle name Mallord – at Brentford on the Thames, by whom he was partly brought up after his mother became insane.
He was a sturdy walker on his tours of the country and Continent, and he enjoyed shooting with his patrons such as Fawkes and Lord Egremont at Petworth. However, his passion was fishing, and it was not by chance that his homes and other properties were mostly on the Thames, and many of his happiest days were in his boat at Twickenham.
This little show includes not only the head of a heron, equalled in avian watercolour only by Dürer’s wing of a jay, but also one of his rods, and a previously unexhibited letter signed with a drawing of a mallard as a punning signature.
Although it was not always obvious to his contemporaries, who ranked him
with now rather overlooked artists such as William Collins, Clarkson Stanfield and William West Cope, Turner was a true pioneer, whose influence is still evident.
For a long time, it was a fashionable cultural cringe among British art historians to maintain that the French Impressionists owed nothing to his innovations. To their French equivalents, this has long been known to be nonsense.
The anniversary is being celebrated not just around Britain, but around the world. One of the most important will be ‘Turner and Constable’ at Tate Britain (27th November to 12th April 2026).
The Oldie June 2025
GARDENING
DAVID WHEELER
CLOSING TIME IN MY GARDEN
Having made four serious gardens in my life, I am for the first time seriously unmaking one.
When we decamped from Herefordshire to Carmarthenshire in south-west Wales four years ago, I expected to spend my dotage beautifying its ten acres. I thought I would establish yet another arboretum, and trawl through British and European nurseries and growers in the hope of extending my hydrangea collection into one of significant importance. Like old Brown himself, back in the 18th century, we considered the land we acquired to have the ‘capability’ of improvement. It did. It still has. Much time and money have been spent on chasing that dream.
This is neither the time nor the place to say why we’re moving and until the ink is dried on the contracts, I’ll keep mum about our proposed new address. Suffice to say, we are (slightly) downsizing – five bedrooms rather than our present 14; six acres, not this garden’s ten. All, we hope, a tad more manageable for someone entering his ninth decade this autumn, and whose partner is a mere 16 years younger.
We sold our previous property more quickly than anticipated, forcing a move in August –perhaps the worst month to move established plants. Hence many were left in situ, though I brought numerous cuttings.
This move is a little better planned. I started digging treasured and comparatively young plants in February. A kind local nurseryman offloaded used plastic pots in various sizes. He
was grateful to do so, as he’d otherwise have to pay for their disposal –conscientious professionals are worried about the transference of plant diseases that can persist in pre-loved containers.
Confession: I personally dug few of the trees and shrubs. With titanium rods supporting my spine and muscle weakness caused by an oncologist’s (thankfully effective) knife – not to mention my age – it was the job of a younger man. Thanks, John.
Until we move (and that’s going to be fun!), I’m now watering some 400 potted-up woody plants twice a day. (Oh, and there’re my 600 or so rooted hydrangea cuttings to nanny.)
It speaks well of the compost we’ve used when I consider how much better the growth of these transplants is compared with those I’m leaving in the ground. The Japanese maples were dug at bud burst in mid-March. They’ve rocketed, leading me better to understand and appreciate the timeless tradition of nurturing containerised plants around Eastern temples and other sacred sites.
I’m taking around 200 different hydrangea plants with me. Top growth was cut back to about a foot high, and lifted on wet days when soil clung thickly to their roots, popped into pots and gently firmed in. Regular irrigation has helped the compost to bed itself in securely.
I’m leaving behind those varieties that are commonly found in garden centres, concentrating on rarities sourced from specialist nurseries and fellow hydrangea aficionados. Many of my hydrangeas came as cuttings. They were taken by the owner himself, I
hasten to add, at the Shamrock Association’s garden at Varengeville-surMer, just west of Dieppe, holders of the French national collection of hydrangeas.
My many visits there over the past 15 years have enriched my collection – and, incidentally, given me a fondness for the oysters of Normandy’s chalk-cliffed coast.
Hydrangeas and Japanese maples (Acer palmatum and A japonicum varieties) comprise the core of my newly containerised hoard. I’m now considering how best to ferry my other (smaller) collections –regal pelargoniums, Siberian irises, hellebores, clematis, hostas, rare narcissi and a cloud of ghostly succulents sourced from private gardens along the Côte d’Azur. My garden holds more memories than plants. Happily, I can find a way of taking both.
David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal
KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD SALAD LEAVES
Cut-and-come-again is not an attractive phrase but where you see the description on the back of a seed packet of salad leaves, they are well worth growing. Last year, having broadcast seeds of mixed lettuce leaves, we were cutting them, and they were coming again, throughout the summer and into autumn.
Mizuna is an originally Japanese mustard green, with serrated leaves and a peppery flavour. An oriental seed mix is likely to contain a variety of mustards, as well as mizuna and the similar mibuna. They are happy in cool, damp weather and will tolerate the cold. However, as brassicas, they are tempting to pigeons and may need to be netted. Sarah Raven also supplies seeds of spicy mustard wasabi. Simpson’s Seeds of Horningsham,
Japanese maple
Wiltshire, have an Italian salad-leaf mixture, including leaf chicory, radicchio and escarole, which is a broad-leaved endive. Red orach is another interesting plant, both edible and ornamental, with purple-red pointed leaves.
Some salad-leaf seeds are better sown in July or August, to be enjoyed in autumn and even later in mild weather.
Among these are lamb’s lettuce (corn salad), which I have never grown successfully, and land cress, which lasts longer and is easier to grow than watercress – and with a similar taste.
Rocket seed sown in July is less likely to bolt, and can be combined with a sowing of winter purslane, with leaves looking rather like miniature waterlily pads. It is also called miner’s lettuce, supposedly because, during the Californian gold rush, miners ate it to ward off scurvy.
There are, of course, other leaves to look out for to add variety to a salad. Minutina is hardy and thrives in cold, wet conditions. Salad burnet is an undistinguished-looking plant which is said to have a mild taste of cucumber.
Alecost has a scent of mint and, as the name suggests, was formerly used as a substitute for hops.
Among the perennial herbs that we grow here, two of the most vigorous, lovage and bronze fennel, can make a welcome addition to any salad.
COOKERY
ELISABETH LUARD VERY MERRY BERRIES
The season of home-grown berries is in full swing.
Strawberries ripen first, followed by raspberries and gooseberries – prickly little things which flourish in the wild throughout the northern hemisphere.
They have an affinity with mackerel, a fatty fish that needs a touch of sharpness.
Even when perfectly ripe, gooseberries never lose their lemony sourness. The first of the crop are small, hard and mouthpuckeringly sharp – perfect for a fool, that particularly English combination of stewed fruit and whipped cream. When a little more mature and sweeter, they’re just right for a crumble. At the end of the season, they make an excellent chutney.
Gooseberry-and-hazelnut crumble
A sharp layer of fruit is topped with a crunchy flour-nut-butter-sugar lid – easy as pie, and a lot less fuss. Serves 4-6.
The filling
750g gooseberries, topped and tailed
100g soft brown sugar (more if the berries are very sour)
The crumble
175g plain flour
25g ground hazelnuts
100g cold butter, diced
2 tbsps brown sugar
Pack the fruit and sugar into a deep pie dish with a couple of spoonsful of water. Pack the crumble ingredients into a liquidiser or processor and give the mixture a blast with the blades till it comes together roughly (don’t over-mix). Spread it over the fruit in a thick layer, pressing it in a little so you get a few lumps. Sprinkle with the brown sugar.
Bake in a moderate oven – 350°F/180°C/ Gas 4 for half an hour – until the crumble is nicely browned. Shove in a knife to see if the fruit is soft – if not, turn the oven down and give it another 10 minutes. Serve warm with clotted cream or vanilla ice cream.
Gooseberry-and-elderflower fool
The fragrance of elderflowers in bloom perfectly complements the lemony sharpness of the berries. Serves 4-6.
500g gooseberries, topped and tailed 4-5 elderflowers or 100ml undiluted elderflower cordial
3-4 tbsps sugar
300 ml double cream, whipped
To finish Brown sugar
Pack the gooseberries in a pan with the elderflowers or cordial and the sugar. Simmer gently until really soft – about 10 minutes. Remove the elderflowers, then squash the berries thoroughly or give them a quick whizz in the food processor, but don’t sieve – the crunchy little seeds are half the joy. Taste and stir in more sugar if the purée’s a little tart. Allow to cool and combine with half the cream. Spoon into pretty glasses, top each portion with another spoonful of cream, and sprinkle just before serving with a crunchy topping of sugar.
Gooseberry-and-ginger chutney
A spiced picnic chutney, to eat with a slab of cheddar and brown bread, or a thick slice of York ham and a chunk of wellbuttered baguette, or a slice of pork pie. Makes enough to fill 2 jam jars.
1kg green gooseberries, topped and tailed
250g raisins or sultanas, de-pipped
Thumb-sized piece of ginger, peeled and diced
150ml malt vinegar
150g soft brown sugar
1 tsp whole mustard seeds
1 level tsp salt
Cook the gooseberries with a splash of water in a heavy pan till the skins soften and the fruit collapses – about 5 minutes. Stir in the raisins, diced ginger, vinegar, sugar, mustard seeds and salt. Bubble up, turn the heat right down, and leave to simmer gently, stirring regularly with a wooden spoon, for 30 minutes or so, till thick and jammy. Pot up and cover tightly. Ready immediately; better in a month.
RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE YOUR TREAT!
I’ve been on a roll of being treated to lunch and dinner.
Don’t be envious. It’s so stressful. Just what are the rules of engagement?
Going Dutch is simple and relaxing: you both sit there out-choosing each other. Happy thought bubbles hover around the table. ‘If he’s having the larks’ tongues at £25, I’ll have the dormice in honey for £28’ etc.
And, as for the wine, you can both go through the list and then blurt out, ‘I really can’t afford a 2010’, in the hope they’ll say, ‘Let me pay the extra.’
But when you’re taken out, it’s one long trauma interspersed with lots of faux humble gratitude.
What to choose? Like most of you, I was brought up with the rule ‘Order the cheapest dishes when you’re not paying.’ But who goes out for bangers ’n’ mash or fishcakes?
Then the wine. How often have I stared at my empty glass for 20 minutes before the host looks aghast, as if I’m a methsdrinking tramp, and whispers, ‘Let me see about getting you a refill.’ And, of course, they’ve chosen the slowest restaurant outside the Andaman Islands. So, before you know it, they order coffee and the drawbridge of joy is hoisted up. Recently, I helped Mean Friend move house and, for months, with tricky paperwork. She grudgingly took me out for a main course and a glass of red wine.
This time, we were joined by her friends Sophie and Dan, for whom the expression ‘hail-fellow-well-met’ must have been invented. We went to Dan’s local, the Andover Arms, in Hammersmith, where everyone knows him.
It’s a great boozer – far less selfconscious than its neighbour, the Anglesea Arms, and the food is easily as good.
Diversion. In the ’90s, uber-charming Colin Clark of The Prince and the Showgirl fame told me that he lived in Chelsea, but every Friday he and his wife would load up their car and head to their country cottage.
When I asked where it was, he giggled, ‘Hammersmith. We’re always too tired to cook after the journey, so on Friday we always have dinner in the Anglesea Arms.’
The menu arrives and I say loudly, ‘I’ll have the burger, like Theo.’ Mean Friend is pogoing in her chair at the money saved until our Dan says, ‘Why don’t we three share the T-bone for £110?’
Then my old Scottish friend Alex offers to take me out to lunch, years after I treated him to an all-dayer. When we arrived at Kin, an amazing veggie restaurant near Oldie Towers, I was told to choose the wine, too.
How? The cheapest bottle was £40. More guilt, in spite of the dappled sunlight on our table.
Have you been to Brunswick House, built for the eponymous duke in 1765? It’s the only nice building in Wandsworth Road. It’s a fabulous antique shop most of the time, and now serves great food.
Luckily, my host was my son. Being in the trade, he was allowed to bring his own bottles and got a 40-per-cent discount.
So no guilt whatsoever, especially when I estimate he has received £28,629 in entertainment in his first 25 years.
DRINK
BILL KNOTT
HIGH-ALTITUDE
WINE
English winemakers will be delighted with this year’s warm and sunny spring. So will the vignerons of Champagne and the Loire Valley. Fragile buds are bursting into life, unthreatened by frost, and fingers are crossed for a ripe and abundant vintage.
Winemakers in warmer latitudes have no problem ripening their grapes: they just worry, in this era of global warming, that they might ripen too early, leaving their wines heady and unbalanced.
One tactic is to compensate for latitude with altitude (or elevation, as they say in the wine world). A vineyard
planted at 600m, for example, will be roughly 3.6°C cooler than one at sea level.
Take Spain. The harvest of Palomino grapes in Jerez starts in late August, when the grapes are ripe but lacking in acidity and character – fortunately, bland grape juice is exactly what is needed to make sherry. In contrast, at Bodegas Altolandon (see this month’s wine offer), 450 miles or so northeast of Jerez, the grapes are never picked before 12th October. Their 120 hectares of vines are planted at 1,100 metres.
Many of the world’s great wine regions have always had elevation built into their terroir – Etna, the Bekaa Valley, Mendoza and the Valle d’Aosta, to name but a few. But, increasingly, winemakers in established regions are planting grapes further up their mountains, while others are seeking out entirely new locations, some at dizzying heights.
The world’s highest vineyard, according to Guinness World Records, is in Lhasa, Tibet. At 3,563m, it is higher than the peak of Mount Etna.
The effects of elevation are more complex than a simple lowering of temperature. The gaps between day and night temperatures – ‘diurnal variations’ – are just as important, especially during the ripening season, when they help to concentrate acid in the grapes, neatly chiming with the global trend towards fresher wines.
I tasted a few high-altitude wines recently with Luca Dusi, the charismatic owner of Passione Vino (passionevino. co.uk), a fiercely Italian wine shop and café in Shoreditch. We tried a poised, delicately floral Carricante from Etna, a Nebbiolo (‘Italian Burgundy’, according to Luca) from Valtellina, a tiny valley near the Swiss border, and a brace of wines – a Granatza white and a Cannonau red – from Barbagia, Sardinia.
This last is a wine region so obscure ‘that not even the Italians know anything about it’. The name Barbagia was apparently coined by Cicero to describe a mountainous region full of barbarians. All its vineyards are at 800m or higher.
I was left with the impression that the technical benefits of high-altitude winemaking are not the only factor at play. If anyone is crazy enough to plant grapes halfway up a mountain, they must be really passionate about what they do, and that dedication seems to show in the wines.
Despite the predations of the climate crisis, however, the winemakers of England will still be seeking south-facing slopes and hoping for bright sunshine for years to come.
A Peak District Pinot is, I hope, many decades away.
This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three high-altitude wines at downto-earth prices: a classic Clare Valley Riesling that benefits from hot summers and cool nights; a Chardonnay from some of the highest vineyards in Mendoza; and a Malbec from an up-and-coming wine region in Spain.
Kirrihill Riesling, Clare Valley, Australia 2022, offer price £14.95, case price £179.40
Beautifully balanced, bone-dry and savoury, bursting with lime. Perfect as an apéritif, or with spicy food.
Felino Chardonnay, Viña Cobos, Mendoza, Argentina 2023, offer price £14.95, case price £179.40
Very lightly oaked, creamy and fresh, with notes of pear and lemon. From vineyards at around 1,000m.
From the hills above Valencia, a spicy, dark, fruit-packed red with fine tannins and a long finish.
Mixed case price £175.40 – a saving of £43.99 (including free delivery)
HOW TO ORDER Call 0117 370 9930 Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm; or email info@dbmwines.co.uk Quote OLDIE to get your special price. Free delivery to UK mainland. For details visit www.dbmwines. co.uk/promo_OLD NB Offer closes 22nd July 2025
JIM WHITE
THE LIONS KING
When it was announced that the captain of the British and Irish Lions squad heading down to Australia this summer was to be Maro Itoje, no one was remotely surprised.
As sporting shocks go, this one was up there with Paris St Germain winning the French football league or the Boat Race being scooped by Oxford or Cambridge.
Everyone knew it was coming, because the England skipper is far and away the outstanding candidate for the job. He isn’t just a strong, courageous, tactically astute player. He isn’t just a leader on the pitch. He is also the kind of ambassador the Lions need to undertake their wider responsibilities.
On the meet-and-greet circuit that is such a part of the tour itinerary, those in charge could ask for no better representative. Smart, articulate and enthusiastic, he charms everyone he meets.
To spend five minutes in his company is to be convinced this is a man who would succeed at anything he attempted. You could easily see him as the boss of a merchant bank, the anchor of the ten-o’clock news or even the leader of one of our political parties. He has a lot more going for him than any of the current bunch.
Much has been made of the fact he’s the first man of colour to lead the Lions. But there is nothing remotely revolutionary about Maro Itoje. He is a representative of the way things have always been. He is the establishment candidate. Itoje went to Harrow, the school that has trained the elite for centuries. He went there on a sports scholarship and astonished the staff with his brilliance at anything he tried. His former headmaster Barnaby Lenon goes misty-eyed at the memory of watching the young giant tearing it up on the school’s myriad sports pitches.
Aged 16, he represented England at shot put. He was a superb cricketer. But his thing was rugby: he was unstoppable. Harrow instilled in him the selfconfidence to assume he would make it. At most schools, they’ll tell even their most gifted pupils to give it a go, while warning them there are loads of others trying to do the same thing and maybe they should have a backup. Itoje was told yes, of course you will succeed. After all, you went to Harrow.
It is an approach to education honed to create leaders of empire. Entitled, certain, self-assured, off they went around the globe, convinced they’d been born to rule. It’s a methodology that might be
thought to have had its day in these more egalitarian times. Except it is the perfect preparation for a life in sport, where self-confidence is everything.
Where sport was once thought secondary to academic pursuits in such establishments, increasingly it has become the big offer from the private schools. ‘Come here and we’ll help you become the best in your sporting field’ is increasingly the boast of the paid-for sector. It is not an empty proposal.
Thirty-eight per cent of last summer’s GB Olympic squad went to private school. Half the current England cricket team did. Increasingly, Premier League teams are linking up with such places to educate their footballing trainees.
The reason is simple: if you want to be part of the sporting elite, it is more than helpful to believe you belong. Actually, it is vital: sport is no place for impostor syndrome.
The old Duke of Wellington saw about the Battle of Waterloo may well need updating. Should Maro Itoje lead them to success, the 2025 British and Irish Lions tour will have been won on the playing fields of Harrow.
MOTORING ALAN JUDD
THE MAGIC OF ROUNDABOUTS
Some claim that the first was spotted in the US in 1903; others that the earliest pure-bred example was identified in France in 1907.
A solitary specimen migrated to Britain – Letchworth – in 1909. Since then, they have proliferated throughout the UK. According to ChatGPT, there are now 25,976 of them. France is reckoned to have the most, with confirmed sightings of approximately 67,000. I have long owned an illustrated book about them.
I am talking about roundabouts. They used to be known as gyratories, happily renamed in this country in 1926. ‘Roundabout’ is a much more human, almost cuddly term, suggestive of co-operation and engagement – even fun – rather than the cold, technical ‘gyratory’.
It’s like the difference between imperial measurements – an inch is very roughly your thumb; a foot your foot; a yard your step – and the inhuman precision of metric.
Modern UK roundabouts, standardised by spacing and the requirement to give way to those already on it, were the 1966 invention of Frank Blackmore of the Transport Research Laboratory. He also invented the mini-roundabout, those upturned saucers painted on the road, which you’re allowed to drive over only if there’s no room to drive round.
American research indicates that, compared with other forms of intersection, including traffic-light junctions, roundabouts encourage lower speeds. They result in fewer accidents, less noise, less fuel use (less time spent idling), a 10-per-cent increase in traffic flow and greater safety for pedestrians.
However, they’re more dangerous for cyclists, which is the reason for the latest example of urban vandalism perpetrated by Transport for London: turning the modest, free-flowing roundabout between Horseferry Road and Lambeth Bridge into a traffic-light junction.
It’s good to protect cyclists, but the lawless behaviour of many in London (our Editor excepted, of course), who routinely ignore red lights and invade pavements, makes it questionable whether there will be any improvement.
My book on the subject is by Kevin Beresford, a printer who in 2002/3 was inspired to produce a calendar entitled The Roundabouts of Redditch, a selection of 12 from the town’s proud total of 41.
Within weeks, he had sold 100,000 copies around the world, spawning other distinguished calendars such as the AA-inspired Car Parks of the UK and Roadworks of Redditch (his home town).
Meanwhile, Beresford wrote his seminal book, Roundabouts of Great Britain, as well as founding a formidable pressure group, the six-strong UK Roundabouts Appreciation Society. He was recently appointed adviser to an episode of the Discovery+ show James May and The Dull Men’s Club, in which the former Top Gear presenter attempts to drive through Milton Keynes without stopping. Milton Keynes is rightly famed for its 130 glorious roundabouts.
According to Beresford, ‘There’s nothing more expressive than a roundabout: it’s English in its good manners, with people giving way to each other, whereas a set of traffic lights is fascist in its demands that you stop and go only when it allows you to.’
After deep immersion in his selection, it’s hard to disagree. The Brunel Roundabout in Slough, which featured in the titles of the BBC series The Office, is indeed pleasingly proportioned.
Others, such as the mini-roundabout outside Swindon Bus Station, are harder to warm to. I had expected better of Telford’s Naird Roundabout and found it difficult to say anything about the one near Anne Hathaway’s cottage in Stratford-upon-Avon, apart from the fact that that’s where it is and where she was. By the way, I also have a book about the A272, and another giving distances between railway stations in miles and chains.
Matthew Webster: Digital Life Beware of the web’s rabbit holes
A reader writes that she is concerned that her husband, new to the internet, has been trustingly going wherever it leads him. He devours what he finds there and is developing political views that she finds unappealing. She’s worried he is being led astray.
She is right to worry. He is at risk.
One of the strengths of the internet is the access it gives us to a range of opinions. But one of its weaknesses is that it tends to send you further and further down a single path, right or wrong.
Especially at risk are those, like our reader’s husband, with modest digital proficiency; he has limited experience in
Webwatch
For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk
getsafeonline.org/checkawebsite
Determine whether a website is likely to be legitimate or not before you visit it.
choralevensong.org
Tells you when choral evensong is being livestreamed and where from. A hidden gem.
I will happily try to solve your basic computer and internet problems. Go to www.askwebster.co.uk or email me at webster@theoldie.co.uk
managing the nuances of safe internet navigation. The seductive allure of the single mouse click is hard to resist. But that innocent little click can lead you into all sorts of dark alleyways of half-truth, fraud and even radicalisation.
The psychology behind these traps is simple. It relies on the con man’s centuries-old tools: appeals to emotion, fear, greed or urgency.
Think of a trusting chap who sees a link on a well-known news website offering to reveal a ‘shocking truth’.
He clicks and is shown a convincing article that subtly leads him to another site full of half-truths and conspiracy theories. From there, it’s a short step to a forum of like-minded individuals who rush to endorse his fears.
To make it worse, even if he wholly disapproves of the article he’s just read, the search engines will innocently continue to show him similar tosh; they think it’s what he wants to see. This is known as a search-engine ‘filter bubble’, which reinforces specific views and limits your exposure to alternative opinions.
It’s hard to avoid. The advertisements you see on a respectable website are usually served up by an agency that pays the host website for the privilege.
But the website itself often has little or no control over which ads appear, even if they are for dodgy miracle health cures, fraudulent investment opportunities or calls to dubious political action. And they are all asking for only one little mouse-click.
None of this is new, of course. Snake-
oil salesmen, fraudulent faith-healers, dodgy psychics and cult leaders have always targeted the vulnerable. But not until now have they had it so easy; in the olden days, they at least had to travel to their victims. Nowadays the internet will serve up their prey on a silver salver.
It’s difficult to know how to advise our worried reader. She could try to persuade her husband to check where each link is taking him. Hovering over the link before clicking shows you where it wants to take you. If it looks odd, leave it alone.
She might suggest that he minimise his exposure to social media. This is where the worst offenders lurk. She could encourage him to create a trusted list of news sources rather than relying on Facebook for information.
We should all be sceptical of sensationalism. If an article or advertisement makes grandiose claims, especially about politics, health or finances, then cross-check the information with reputable sources.
Your computer can help. Modern browsers (Chrome, Microsoft Edge and the rest) have much improved filters that try to spot the crooks. They are far from infallible, but don’t ignore their warnings.
The internet is a powerful tool and, like all tools, should be handled with care. The ultimate solution is a mix of education, vigilance and the right tools. I have long believed this sort of education should start at an early age.
As children, we learn how to use a knife safely – so why not the internet?
Neil Collins: Money Matters
Rare-earth metals aren’t so rare
Help! We’re running out of things.
No more oil, copper or rare earths. In fact, the elements in this obscure slice of the periodic table are not particularly rare at all – and Ukraine doesn’t have much of them.
What it does have is titanium, which combines steel’s strength with the corrosion resistance and lightness of aluminium, and makes brilliant white paint pigment. It’s expensive not because it is rare, but because it is hard to refine.
As Ed Conway reveals in his book Material World, it is a struggle to find anything that we have truly exhausted. Rare-earth metals go into mobile phones and EV batteries. But such is the pace of development that today’s must-have battery ingredient might be displaced tomorrow by something as commonplace as an iron compound.
Forecasts of a world shortage of lithium drove the price up tenfold; since then, it has rattled nearly all the way back
down. Today’s favourite scarce metal, uranium, is likely to follow a similar path. Commodities have proved terrible long-term investments. Mines start development when prices are high but often have to sell when prices are low.
Perhaps President Zelenskyy understands this with his mining deal with President Trump.
If you want something really rare, you must look elsewhere. The lighter isotope of helium (3He) is probably the world’s
most expensive material. It's one of the very few physical things that can escape the earth (think of a helium balloon).
And it's extremely useful in anything to do with nuclear physics. There is more of the stuff on the moon than on Earth, because the moon has no atmosphere to push the lighter atoms into space.
There isn’t even a shortage of gold, which is dug up in one part of the world only to be buried in another. Most of it is
in Fort Knox, which supposedly holds 147.3 million troy ounces in 368,000 400oz bars, but nobody knows for sure, since the last audit was over 70 years ago.
Contemplating another one defies practicality, given the need to prevent the army of auditors walking out with slivers of bullion. It would take Goldfinger weeks to steal even a fraction of it.
At today’s runaway gold price, the hoard is worth about $430 billion,
although selling even a fraction might do serious damage to that price. Since no administration has any such intention, what is it for – or is it really all there?
As for backing the US national debt, Uncle Sam has borrowed $30 trillion –so the gold is good for about 1.5 cents in each dollar. Not much help then.
Neil Collins was the Daily Telegraph’s City Editor
the real Tenerife
at the time of the famous Carnaval with Kirsty Fergusson
Tenerife is the ideal destination to escape an English winter: a perfect combination of sunshine, verdant mountainous landscapes and Spanish colonial architecture. And we’ll be going at the time of their carnival which only Rio supersedes. Yet the wonders don’t end there.
Oldie stalwart Kirsty Fergusson knows the island and its gardens well, and has plotted our itinerary, which includes a day trip to the romantic island of La Gomera; and a tasting of Malmsey, a surfeit of which overwhelmed the Duke of Clarence. Kon-Tiki fans will be delighted to know we’ll be visiting the home of Thor Heyerdal.
Kirsty has also chosen our hotel near Garachico, La Quinta Roja, the 17thcentury home of the Marquesas de la Quinta Roja. Have a look at quintaroja.com
ITINERARY– please go to www. theoldie.co.uk/courses-tours
Wednesday 11th February – arrival Transfer to Hotel la Quinta Roja, in Garachico. Gather for welcome drinks and an introduction to the history of Tenerife, followed by dinner at the hotel’s acclaimed restaurant.
Thursday 12th February – Garachico and Icod de los Vinos
Walking tour of picturesque Garachico, including a visit to the cigar shop where they still roll cigars by hand; then a short drive to an enchanting butterfly garden, El Mariposario del Drago at Icod de la Vinos; lunch nearby at El
11th to 18th February 2026
Mortero. Visit the Malvasia Museum and try a glass of Shakespeare’s favourite tipple, Malmsey wine. Dinner at the hotel.
Friday 13th February – La Laguna and Santa Cruz Carnival
In the morning explore the perfectly preserved streets and squares of historic La Laguna. Lunch at Patio Canario. Continue to Santa Cruz and visit the lush gardens of the Palmetum. Dinner at El Porron Tasca Andaluza, from where we enjoy the flamboyant spectacle of the Opening Parade of the Carnaval.
Saturday 14th February – Mount Teide National Park
We take a trip high into the Teide National Park. Lunch at the Parador is followed by a gentle walk through the extraordinary volcanic landscape… even in February, wild flowers are to be found in abundance. Dinner at the hotel.
Sunday 15th February – The island of La Gomera Ferry from Los Cristianos to San Sebastian de la Gomera, enjoying the extraordinary view of Mount Teide from the sea. Tour of the historic capital of the island and discover the story of Christopher Columbus’s enduring liaison with the beautiful Beatriz de Bobadilla. Dinner at the hotel. Monday 16th February –Guimar and Thor Heyerdal Cross the island to Guimar, home to the late Norwegian adventurer Thor Heyerdal of Kon-Tiki fame. Visit the Guanche pyramids in the botanic gardens and the Chacona House Museum. Lunch. Free afternoon and dinner in Garachico. Tuesday 18th February – La Oratava and Puerto de la Cruz
La Orotava is the jewel in Tenerife’s crown. Its leafy affluence and smart boutiques make for very pleasant wandering. Visit to the Victoria gardens; lunch at Sabor Canario. On to Puerto de la Cruz and the garden of El Sitio Litre, where Agatha Christie wrote The Mysterious Mr Quinn Later we visit the botanic gardens, before dinner at by the sea at Cofradía Las Aguas in the pretty fishing village La Aguas. Wed 18th February – departure
A leisurely departure at 11.00 for our flight from BA Tenerife South to Gatwick at 14.40, arriving 18.55.
HOW TO BOOK: Call 01225 427311 or please email Katherine at reservations@theoldie.co.uk. Price per person sharing a double/twin room: £2,995 including 7 nights’ accommodation, all transport, return ferry tickets to La Gomera, all meals, wine with meals and entrances. Flights are not included. You need to pay for drinks outside of meals. Single supplement: £500. Deposit £750 per person; balance due 1st November.
Above: La Orotava Right: La Gomera
Long-eared owl
by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd
When it comes to the long-eared owl (Asio otus), beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
W H Hudson, in British Birds (1895), said, ‘The long-eared owl may be described as a bird of beautiful plumage.’
And John Lewis-Stempel wrote in The Secret Life of Owls (2017), ‘Plumage is dreary grey, with the typical bars and streaks of a woodland habitué.’
Differing opinions aside, one is unlikely in Britain to see this most nocturnal and discreet of owls. Miriam Darlington, in Owl Sense (2018), rated the chance, in climbing terms, as ‘ED’ –extremely difficult.
This is not principally because of scarcity. Distributed across the UK and Ireland, its 1,000-3,600 pairs earn it a green classification on the GB Birds of Conservation Concern list. In Ireland, long-eared and barn owls are the sole owl residents. Absence of the predominantly nocturnal tawny owl is to the long-eared’s advantage.
Broad estimation of its numbers reflects its shy nature. It calls with characteristic discretion and only in the breeding season, which begins in February.
The tawny owl nests in tree holes; the long-eared in old nests of other birds, especially crows and magpies. Its favourite tree is any kind of conifer. Its favourite dwelling is dense conifer forest, where it sleeps by day and hunts at night.
Its name was first conferred by Thomas Pennant (1726-78), naturalist, traveller, writer, antiquarian of Downing Hall, Flintshire (house no longer standing).
Local names – such as hornie hoolet in Scotland, tended to reference ‘horns’ rather than ‘long ears’ (used in Somerset). The Latin asio means ‘horn’.
In fact, the ‘ears’ are feathered tufts, which the owl raises when threatened or aroused, or for camouflage. When the bird is relaxed or in flight, they lie invisibly flat. The earholes run almost the
length of the skull – the longest of any owl species. Muscles controlling the tufts may affect the bird’s hearing.
It tends to roost in numbers – the only reliable way of seeing. But, in deference to its shyness, there is caution in publicising the UK roosts. One site, protected by water, is at Dungeness, Kent.
The British Isles represents only one per cent of the European long-eared population. The best place to see it is Serbia; the most famous roost is the town square of Kikinda. Miriam Darlington finally pursued it there.
In Serbia, smallholdings, rich in fauna and flora, remain plentiful and winters have warmed there, to the long-eared’s benefit. Country trees, long
gone for firewood, are compensated for by towns’ and villages’ planting fastgrowing conifers.
The Bird Protection and Study Society of Serbia (BPSS) has been founded and has introduced owl nest boxes. Formerly, locals took pot shots at owls. Now there are owl festivals, with pottery, toys and biscuits to welcome tourist ‘owl-aholics’. October to February is peak season.
Kikinda is the world’s owl capital, with 800 long-eareds. Even in summer, there can be 300.
The cardinal rule of the BPSS is non-disturbance. To Darlington’s horror, at the flash of her camera 100 longeareds erupted from a Kikinda pine tree into the November dusk.
Travel
Sun, sea –and the Mob
In Calabria, James Pembroke tracks down Greek bronzes and Mafia hoods
‘
I’m sorry, Daddy, but I don’t want to come on holiday with you and Leo.’ I was upset and also surprised, given that Honor, my daughter, had booked all the hotel rooms for the three of us.
She then gave her reason. ‘I don’t want to be kidnapped.’
It was my fault. Two weeks before our flight to Calabria, I had sent her a copy of Alex Perry’s 2018 book about the ’Ndrangheta, The Good Mothers: The True Story of the Women Who Took On the World’s Most Powerful Mafia. I had
hoped it would be a life-affirming tale of female courage.
My son, Leo, and I were still laughing about it with her at Stansted. I wasn’t laughing as I turned the pages of Perry’s book. Although I found the Calabrese to be charming and welcoming during our four-day tour, and their food and scenery to be world-class, I just couldn’t lose that uneasy feeling.
But then I began to think, ‘Why not feel uneasy on holiday?’
Isn’t that more memorable? The Editor once took the Oldie staff on a
works jolly to Belfast. Instead of showing us the new Titanic Museum, he took us on a taxi tour of the Falls Road and all its homicidal memorials.
We returned as traumatised but invigorated survivors. I told Barry Cryer about our jaunt, and he told me, ‘At the height of the Troubles, Willie Rushton and I stayed in the Europa Hotel, which was always being blown up. At reception, they asked us to fill in a guest survey, and in response to the question “How did you
An offer you can’t refuse: Tropea
hear about us?”, Willie scribbled, “News at Ten”.’
In his masterpiece Old Calabria (1915), Norman Douglas wrote, ‘Calabria is not a land to traverse alone. It is too wistful and stricken, too deficient in those externals that conduce to comfort.’
Odysseus felt much the same, after encountering Scylla in Calabria and Charybdis across the strait, off the coast of Sicily.
The region, only 139 miles long, has mountains that pack a punch. Monte Pollino is over 7,000 feet high; Aspromonte, where Garibaldi was shot in the foot, is over 6,000 feet.
And, without roads, lawlessness – or, rather, a home-made legal system – in the valleys was inevitable.
The postwar arrival of DDT, used to control malaria, and EU roads had diluted this, but only up to a point.
Away from the grandeur of Reggio Calabria, with its stone’s-throw view of Sicily, there are some of the roughest towns in Europe: semi-built fortress homes, black hoodies on washing lines, incomplete bridges and flyovers.
At our favourite lunch venue, the Trattoria del Pesce Fresco in Reggio, we couldn’t help noticing the boys in trackie bottoms at a table by the door collecting an envelope. Maybe this is what Dean Martin was singing about (‘All you Calabrese do the mambo like-a-crazy’).
We had borne witness to a handover of the pizzo. It was far better than a private tour of the Sistine Chapel.
So, as we drove down the toe of Italy to Tropea, passing Crotone where Pythagoras taught, I was able to regale my children with my knowledge of the ’Ndrangheta (pronounced En-drungeta) – the most murderous and terrifying criminal organisation in the world, who now handle money-laundering for other criminal fraternities, including the Triads. Far from exuding wealth, wanted ’Ndrangheta bosses like to be scruffy when on the street, before returning incognito to their underground bunkers to pop open a bottle of Cristal.
The first mentions of Mafiosi in police reports appear in the 1860s, after the unification of Italy, when both landowners such as The Leopard and peasant workers wanted protection from the new Piedmontese government, in whom they had absolutely no trust.
Apart from the major clampdown during the Mussolini era, these highly
John Paul Getty III, his ear butchered by ’Ndrangheta, 1973
organised gangs forcibly took control of distribution and construction and extorted protection money from every business south of Rome.
By the early20th century, the Sicilian Mafia, the Neapolitan
Camorra and the ’Ndrangheta were all peddling a glorious foundation myth.
Three medieval Spanish knights –Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso – had fled their homeland after avenging their sister’s rape. They landed on the tiny island of Favignana off Sicily’s west coast and inexplicably spent the next 29 years holed up in damp sea caverns, nursing a sense of righteous grievance.
Eventually, they decided on a brotherhood of mutual defence and swore to protect one another so that no outsider would slight them again.
Mastrosso sailed to Naples to set up the Camorra in honour of the Madonna. Osso sailed to Sicily and founded Cosa Nostra in the name of Saint George. And Carcagnosso took a land between his brothers –Calabria – where he was to establish the ’Ndrangheta in the name of St Michael the Archangel. It’s all nonsense and possibly copied from the Garduña, a Spanish criminal society, whom they would have heard of, when the Kingdom of Naples was ruled by the Aragonese.
Their initiation rituals are intentionally religious and also have a strain of Freemasonry. The theory goes that, in the 1850s, criminals were housed in the same prisons as the revolutionaries, many of whom were masons, and they shared their secret rituals and, most importantly, the concept of omertà
Cacciola – the ’Ndrangheta bosses’ wives who spilled the beans – this kept the organisation as tight as any family.
Honor wasn’t being entirely paranoid about kidnap. Who can forget the fate of John Paul Getty III, taken by ’Ndrangheta hoods in Rome, in July 1973? His grandfather, J Paul Getty, defended his refusal to pay the ransom of $17 million, with the excuse ‘If I pay one penny now, I’ll have 14 kidnapped grandchildren.’ So they sent him his 16-year-old grandson’s left ear.
Getty Senior then relented – by lending his son the final ransom balance of $700,000 at 4-per-cent interest. Encouraged by this, the westcoast ’Ndrangheta went on to stage 150 more kidnappings.
The recent publication of The Godfather Lover’s Guide to Sicily may well see coachloads descend on Corleone in Sicily. I can’t see many people wanting to drive through the miserable ’Ndrangheta heartlands of Palmi and Gioia Tauro. Still, the Aspromonte mountains are stunning and the hill town of Gerace, with its medieval cathedral and Norman churches, is definitely worth a visit – after you’ve seen the Riace bronzes in Reggio.
The pair of six-foot-six figures were discovered off the Ionian Coast in 1972. They are so anatomically perfect that it is difficult to believe anyone could
Riace bronze (c 450 BC), Reggio Calabria
Until the recent trials connected with the murders of Lea Garofalo and Maria
fifth-centuryBC Magna Graecia. Their silver-toothed grimaces are as menacing as anything Ray Harryhausen imagined. I became a little worried that they might step down from their plinths and challenge
Fortunately, their swords
In the tradition of all things Calabrese, even their sudden discovery aroused suspicions. There may even have been a third statue. My guess is that he is
underground bunker,
Overlooked Britain
Beauty of the Isle of Bute
At Mount Stuart, the Marquess of Bute built a Franco-Venetian marvel – with a Gothic swimming pool
lucinda lambton
Here we go with the King and the Queen of houses, rolled into one glorious whole.
Mount Stuart on the Isle of Bute in Scotland is difficult, if not impossible, to beat for electric beauty. The first sight of it makes you yell out loud with delight and then, the more you explore its quite extraordinary strength and individuality, go on shouting with pleasure.
A mixture of Venetian, French and Spanish Gothic, it is so very extraordinary and unexpected that you can barely believe what stands before you.
It was rebuilt by the 3rd Marquess of Bute after a fire in 1879. He employed Robert Rowand Anderson as his architect and was largely responsible for the house’s sumptuous interior himself, most meticulously supervising the brilliance of the artist and artisans over 20 years.
Lord Bute was an exceptionally serious and scholarly man of remarkable abilities – a romantic and a mystic, an astrologer, a historian, a theologian and an archaeologist, who wove all his erudition into his passion for building.
And what a passion it was; I have always found it impossible to run his equal to ground.
From an early age, he had shown little conformity. Sir Herbert Maxwell wrote of the 21-year-old Lord Bute being encouraged – in vain – to pursue country activities:
‘I retain an impression of him shivering in a woodland ride, the ground being covered with snow. He had on his feet a pair of patent leather shoes, and under his arm a gun which he knew not how to handle. I don’t think that he ever went out shooting again.
‘He used to amuse us by coming to the smoking room at night arrayed in a gorgeous flowing robe modelled after the pattern and colour of a saint’s mantle, as depicted in a stained-glass window of the school chapel at Harrow. If I remember
Left: Muses and Zodiac signs, Marble Hall. Below: Mount Stuart, 1879
aright, it was sky-blue silk lined with violet and enriched with plenty of broad gold lace.’
Having created the ‘medieval’ wonders of Cardiff Castle and Castell Coch in Wales, he set to work on Mount Stuart, with verve and passion.
He was obsessed with medievalism, most particularly when he was influenced by William Burges, the king of such fine artistic sensibilities but, at Mount Stuart, the schemes were often to his own designs.
Walk into the Marble Hall and you are overwhelmed by its vast magnitude – so extraordinarily beautiful that you are left quite breathless by its wonder. It’s 60 feet square and 80 feet high, with a wealth of gleaming marble and brilliant stained glass that rushes up to a central vault emblazoned with the constellations.
A vaulted gallery marches round with a translucent boss to each vault, surrounded by muses with bejewelled stars in their hair, all lighting you up as you walk beneath them, surrounded by a wealth of glittering detail.
The entire hall shines most brilliantly with the colours of the glass, with the signs of the zodiac and with mythological figures and creatures charging through waves of scarlet, purple and blue. It was all designed by Horatio Walter Lonsdale.
Mount Stuart is a dazzling example of 19th-century eclecticism laced through with the bravado of the day.
Lord Bute built an immense white marble chapel, larger than most parish churches, always permanently aglow with the blood-red hues of its clerestory glass.
Both Lord Bute and William Frame also designed exhaustingly elaborate ceilings throughout the building.
Most intoxicating of all in the house is the vaulted Gothic swimming pool – which furthermore is heated! Up you glide, through the water as if swimming up the aisle of a parish church. To this day, I will never ever forget the quite magical sensation of swimming around the stone pillars.
Incidentally, this was also the first house in Scotland to have electricity.
Lord Bute died in 1900, before all the work on the great house was carried out. But, joy of joys, it was taken up again in the 1980s, with a magnificent power and strength that haven’t faded to this day. Hurray, hurray!
Of considerable interest is the mosaic detailing on the east front of the house, inspired by St Volodymyr’s Cathedral in Kiev.
A new and efficient arrangement has now been established for visitors to enjoy the house, the gardens and the wondrous chapel.
For years, the last but one Lord Bute
Fit
had always been active in encouraging a host of young craftsmen from all over Scotland and was involved with companies of furniture-makers, stonemasons, woodcarvers and textile-designers.
His firm, the Edinburgh Tapestry Company, was up-to-the-minute modern, with a range of tapestries for PepsiCo, with designs by Frank Stella.
Today the house is proudly open to the public, with the richest wealth of interest to be nosed out round every corner.
What about one of Shakespeare’s First Folios in the 25,000-book library –discovered to be here in 1916?
When I first went to Mount Stuart, I had the immense good fortune of staying for a week. What a huge delight it was to walk up and down the great marble staircase and round all the extraordinary rooms alone at night, always surrounded by a wild magnitude of decoration.
The 8th Marquess is now on the go, with the house open to all, loved and looked after.
Clerestory glass floods the chapel with blood-red light
for a Gothic church: swimming pool
The grand staircase
Tangier & Fez
14th to 20th April 2026
Kirsty Fergusson will take you into the homes and gardens of some very distinguished ex-pat residents, as well as taking in some of the remarkable highlights of Morocco’s cultural heritage. Beginning in Tangier, where Africa meets Europe, our garden visits take us to both Mediterranean and Atlantic coastal vantage points.
The city had a somewhat raffish reputation during the 20th century as a popular haunt for spies, pop stars and writers of the Beat Generation.
This has been largely eclipsed by its growing sophistication, led by an international cast of interior designers and artists of every stripe.
Fez, the capital of Morocco before 1912 when the French Protectorate was established, has a tangible sense of nobility and tradition.
Riad gardens designed on the traditional Islamic model are to be found hidden behind ancient walls. Travelling outside the city, we also discover the vineyards of Meknes and dramatic Roman remains at Volubilis.
THE ITINERARY
Tuesday 14th April – Arrive in Tangier
Depart London Stansted 10.55; arrive 14.00 at Tangier, on Morocco’s north coast, a strategic port for many centuries, with whitewashed villas and a mediaeval medina. We will check in to the historic El Minzah Hotel, formerly home of the 4th Marquis of Bute. This evening we enjoy welcome drinks and dinner in a local restaurant.
Wednesday 15th April – Walking tour of Tangier & Villa Josephine
Today is spent in Tangier, starting with a walking tour which will take us to St Andrew’s Church, the Gran Socco and the Kasbah, offering views of the Strait
coast to explore the Caves of Hercules, before dining at a local seafood restaurant.
Friday 17th April –
Chefchaouen and Fez
We check out of our hotel and travel to Chefchaouen, the Blue City, famous for its streets and houses painted in bright blue wash. After lunch we continue to Fez, arriving at our hotel, Le Jardin des Biehn, where we dine together.
Saturday 18th April – Fez
of Gibraltar. In the afternoon we visit the Vieille Montagne: a residential quarter of the city, where gardens are blessed with fine views over the sea to the Andalusian mountains. We will have lunch at the elegant Villa Josephine, built in the early 1920s by English journalist Walter Harris, and visit a botanist’s secret garden. Dinner at the hotel restaurant. Thursday 16th April – Donabo and the Caves of Hercules
This morning we head towards Cape Spartel, to explore Donabo, a new botanic garden, the result of a collaboration between English artist Paul Belvoir and Princess Lalla Malika Alaoui.
The gardens have been imaginatively planted and designed in part to encourage local appreciation of the region’s horticultural heritage. Following a delicious lunch, we continue to the
A leisurely start is followed by a guided tour of the Jnan Sbil gardens. In the afternoon, a walking tour of the historic medina reveals notable buildings and palaces and traditional industries such as tanneries. In the afternoon we will have a tour of the gardens at our riad, before dinner in the old city.
Sunday 19th April – Roman city of Volubilis and Meknes
This morning we explore the UNESCO World Heritage Site at Volubilis, provincial capital of the Roman Empire for over 400 years. We continue to the imperial city of Meknes, for lunch and visit a local winery for a tasting.
The Domaine de Baccari, in the foothills of the Middle Atlas mountains, is the project of neurosurgeon Dr Amine Bahnini and his Lebanese wife, Nahla, who started producing wines in 2013 and have won medals at the International Wine Challenge. Dinner will be taken at a nearby Relais & Châteaux restaurant.
Monday 20th April – Moulay Yacoub and departure
Visit Moulay Yacoub, a spa town nestling in green hills filled with wild flowers, just 30 minutes’ drive from Fez, and enjoy a traditional lunch before our flight from Fez to Stansted, departing Fez 19.55. We arrive at London Stansted at 23.15.
HOW TO BOOK: Call Kirker Holidays on 020 7593 2284 or email oldie@kirkerholidays.com. £3,988 per person, which includes return flights (including one hold bag); accommodation with breakfast – three nights at the El Minzah Hotel, Tangier, and three at Le Jardin des Biehn, Fez; lunch and dinner each day, with drinks; all sightseeing, entrance fees and gratuities; the services of the tour lecturer, Kirsty Fergusson, the Kirker tour manager, and a local guide. Single supplement: £547. Supplement to upgrade to a suite at Le Jardin des Biehn: £396 per room.
Above: Chefchaouen Left: imperial city of Meknes Below: El Minzah Hotel
On the Road
Intoxicated by Jeff Bernard
Robert Bathurst tells Louise Flind about playing the Soho roué – and a six-foot-two dwarf in Snow White
Anything you can’t leave home without?
I should take photographs of my pets or copies of my reviews in case anybody stops me in the street.
What’s your favourite destination?
I absolutely loved Nicaragua, apart from our having our binoculars taken away at the airport, in case we were spies.
What are you earliest holiday memories?
Taking boats on the Shannon – we lived in Ireland. Learning to swim in Kerry, and going to Brittas Bay and Connemara.
Do you come from a theatrical background?
My great uncle was the model for Rattigan’s The Winslow Boy
Did you act as a child?
I did shows whenever I could from the age of 11.
When did you realise you could act?
Getting a laugh in the school play and thinking, ‘Crikey, this is good.’
Can you be taught how to act?
There’s a huge amount of technique that you learn the whole time.
Did you always want to be an actor?
It’s where you feel most comfortable and energised and it gives you the greatest buzz.
What was it like being in the Cambridge Footlights?
I auditioned for Snow White and got the job as a dwarf. Six foot two.
What was your first big break?
My breakthrough job came relatively late with Cold Feet Joking Apart was a big one, along with Noises Off in the Savoy Theatre.
Why are you so attracted to Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell, which you have been putting on at the Coach & Horses, his Soho local? Did you know him?
I never met him. I loved his writing. So I was thrilled when James Hillier rang, suggesting a one-person version of the Keith Waterhouse play.
Do you like acting in the pub?
I like doing things close. At the Coach, I have a high table out in the middle and wander around in amongst people.
Do you find it more enjoyable than big theatre?
I like it all. I did my first musical last year, Dolly Parton’s Smoky Mountain Christmas Carol on the South Bank. And that was a huge big theatre. And I had to do a song…
I did a lot of try-outs over an eight-year period, one in Edinburgh and then the disaster: a 12-week run at the Riverside Studios became two weeks.
Do you want your children to follow in your footsteps?
One is aiming in that direction and the other three have no desire to do it at all.
What’s the strangest thing you’ve ever eaten?
What was it like playing Sergeant Wilson in Dad’s Army?
We filmed at Pinewood, where the audience included members of the Dad’s Army Appreciation Society in full uniform. To have a stab at being Sergeant Wilson was daunting.
Do you mind being typecast as posh and diffident?
I just played a psychopathic surgeon on Casualty. The diffident thing is slightly misleading. I’ve played a lot of shits over the years and I enjoy doing that, too.
How did Toast of London come about?
I met Matt Berry and Michael, the director, and read for it.
What’s Matt Berry like?
He can look at things from a different angle.
Where was Cold Feet filmed? In Manchester.
What’s the most glamorous place you’ve ever filmed in?
An episode of Cold Feet in Sydney, an ITV thing in South Africa, and Hornblower in Yalta.
And the least glamorous?
A night shoot in Deptford in the rain.
What happened to your show of Christopher Reid’s Love, Loss and Chianti?
A crocodile sandwich in South Africa.
Do you have a go at the local language?
Victoria, my wife, is a classicist and picks up languages really quickly. She says we must learn Spanish because we’re planning a trip next year. So, there’s a possibility in six months’ time that I’ll be fluent in Spanish – but I wouldn’t hold your breath.
What’s the strangest place you’ve ever slept in?
In a bus station in Turkey, woken up by the sound of people hawking and spitting. And on a metal bench in a railway station in France in my twenties.
What are your travelling tips?
Don’t plan. The last couple of trips we’ve gone on, we’ve simply had a guidebook and gone.
Where did you go on your honeymoon?
To Mexico, Guatemala and Belize. We went for six weeks. I came back after five, two stone lighter, having had salmonella.
Are you brave with different food?
On honeymoon, I did have a chicken taco in Oaxaca, my undoing, and spent the rest of the holiday in the bathroom.
Robert Bathurst is in Casualty on BBC1
Across
Genius crossword 453 EL SERENO
Clues marked * have a place on 13/24 Across Down
1 *Cut great deal (8)
5 * Golf cart carrying American (6)
9 Consider a time in century old holiday cottage (8)
10 Understand and act to bring in power display on dashboard (6)
12 Understand printer corrected text regularly (9)
13 Shot seen in game of golf (5)
14 Sort of American who’s in now as president (4)
16 Reveal support for what Remainers do before leaving (7)
19 * Conned by sporting occasion (7)
21 * Tiresome people with no energy (4)
24 Board put forward subject for discussion (5)
25 Select actors when holding profit for instrument (9)
27 Not quite bringing up fruit (6)
28 * Fancy parcel wrapping five discovered (8)
29 Put into words seeing Romeo occupying stage (6)
30 * Waterbird eaten by queen, say (8)
1 Confine daughter leaving poor Old Nick (4,2)
2 Refute Geordie scandal (6)
3 * Correct originals to some extent (5)
4 Exposed rock group’s work around criminal court (7)
6 Sort a pair out for something a dentist might use (9)
7 Enough regard as the same after a date (8)
8 No working periods giving times of prosperity (8)
11 Excessive love for Bismarck?(4)
15 Sport title with cash involved (9)
17 A good Italian supporter’s political art (8)
18 Fatter new brief covering political party (8)
20 Fish expert under duress at first (4)
21 Mob live on spice – agree oddly (7)
22 Work frantically over welcoming European nations (6)
23 Oldie’s upset seeing her love for Tristan (6)
26 A second key broadcast for machine code (5)
How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk. Deadline: 27th June 2025. We do not sell or share your data with third parties.
First prize is The Chambers Dictionary and £25. Two runners-up will receive £15.
NB: Hodder & Stoughton and Bookpoint Ltd will be sent the addresses of the winners because they process the prizes.
Moron crossword 453
Escargots (6)
Beg (7)
Hunting dog (5)
Porky pies! (4)
Posh musical drama (5)
Curry side order (5) 18 A large and hurried swallow (4)
Winner: Roger and Sue Anderson, Sheffield, South Yorkshire
Runners-up: Alex Newman, Guildford, Surrey; Ben Stroude, West Kirby, Wirral
Canadian international John Carruthers, a friend from Toronto, showed me this four spades from the Soloway Knockout Teams. Plan the play on an opening heart lead.
Dealer West Neither Vunerable
Where Carruthers was West, declarer had won the heart lead and led a spade to the king. West had won the ace and put his partner in with a second heart, and the defence had soon won two diamond tricks in addition – when East naturally switched to the suit. One down. However, there is a winning line, not immediately obvious. You need to use a technique which Ely Culbertson (unimaginatively) referred to as ‘the coup without a name’ – now known as the Scissors Coup.
After winning the first heart, at trick two you cash the ace of clubs, and at trick three you follow with the knave. When East plays low, you deposit your second heart. By swapping a heart loser for a club loser, you have snipped the line of defensive communication so that East cannot win the lead (for a fatal diamond switch through the king).
After winning the king of clubs, West may cash his bare ace of spades (to avoid being endplayed with it presently) and try a second heart.
However, you ruff, cross to the nine of spades, ruff a third club, return to the ten of spades and cash the long clubs, discarding diamonds to make the overtrick. Yes, West could have cashed the ace of diamonds when in with the king of clubs, but that would have merely restricted you to ten tricks. If you didn’t spot it, may I suggest you buy a new pair of scissors?
ANDREW ROBSON
Competition TESSA CASTRO
IN COMPETITION No 319 you were invited to write a poem called The Monster Replies Gail White concluded with a paradoxical offer from the monster: ‘Look underneath your bed tonight/ And I’ll pretend I’m real.’
Brian Allgar’s monster hated familiarity: ‘But you must never rudely call me “Nessie”;/ The fate of those who do is very messy!’ William Wood’s monster was Hope, tempting you to clutch at false straws. Commiserations to them and to Ronan Fitzgerald, David Dixon, Alan Pentecost, Frank McDonald, Stefan Badham, Ann Beckett, Albert Caton and Andrew Lacey, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to Charles Leedham-Green.
There is a monster in my soul that wakes when I’m asleep.
It churns the angry waters of the dreamencrusted deep.
It looks at me with baleful eyes, it knows my heart full well;
And I in my turn gaze at it, caught in a hopeless spell.
‘Tell me, monster, tell me, where are my hopes and fears?
Where are the loves that have left me, where are my youthful years?
Where are my sins and failures, and the things I have left undone?
Why are we meeting here in the dark, and not in the cheerful sun?’
And the monster answers darkly, as it sinks in the darkling sea:
‘Your hopes and fears, your very soul, are all entombed in me.’
Charles Leedham-Green
It was tiny when we got it, But she handled it like a child, Fed it, loved it, gave it succour; The damn thing really drove me wild.
It grew and grew as if it knew That she loved it like its mother, While I began to hate it so, Like a rival little brother.
At last, the ultimatum came. I told my now ex-wife, Rosa, ‘Who goes? Who stays? – It’s me or that Monstera deliciosa.’
I’m proud I took my stance against The plant. I showed her I’m a man. But now I live in cheap hotels, With odd nights in the Sally Ann.
Bob Morrow
I was born in a thunderstorm, sired by a lightning bolt,
Awoke to find myself burdened with the fault
Of my creator, and his botched design. All flesh that is mine
Was someone else’s; nothing in me is imbued with the divine.
I do not know if I am man or woman; I am not like others,
Fashioned as they are in human form. In the glass,
I see a forehead stitched by a savage. My teeth and eyes
Are yellow; I stand eight feet tall, and I am filled with fear.
What I must know is why he made me here, for what release?
The night wind howls outside; the trees are torn. They feel for me,
They grieve my sorry state. I need a mate; someone like me,
To love me, give me meaning, and to bring me peace.
For what else was my broken body born?
G M Southgate
Regarding your recent planning application
Concerning your proposed new house foundations,
I write to clarify the situation
In pursuit of various Planning Regulations. The foundations all look fine, once underpinned,
But using straw is never recommended. You only need few strong puffs of wind
And you’ll end up with the whole pigsty up-ended.
And similarly, when considering sticks –They’re terrible at thermal insulation.
I wonder, have you thought of using bricks? If properly laid, they could be your salvation.
I’ll happily arrange a visit on-site
If there’s any further guidance I can add. The Planning Office number’s on the website.
Signed: Theo Wolf (I’m neither big nor bad).
Con Connell
COMPETITION No 321 Three, two one. On your marks, get set, go. And then comes the starting pistol or lift-off. So please write a poem under the title Countdown, in any sense. Maximum 16 lines. We cannot accept any entries by post, I’m afraid, but do send them by e-mail (comps@theoldie.co.uk – don’t forget to include your own postal address), marked ‘Competition No 321’, by Thursday 26th June.
Taking a Walk
Dad’s last electrifying journey
patrick barkham
For the last year and a half, my dad has been shuffling from his nursing home onto the byways, tracks and commons of his neighbourhood.
This has been a miraculous, late strolling period for a man who has always walked – roaming Somerset lanes as a 1950s hedge kid, clocking up 1,105½ miles of English towpath in retirement (he counted).
Dad has an atypical form of dementia (aren’t they all?), and he’s been with it enough to be the only care-home resident allowed out unaccompanied for a wander.
Gradually, however, his stuttering stride – known as gait-freezing – has worsened. Eventually, he wasn’t safe even with a wheeled walker known as a rollator. So, six months ago, I acquired a secondhand Shoprider, an electric mobility scooter in a tasteful shade of maroon.
To my amazement, this demented technophobe with an able-bodied walker’s disdain for mobility scooters has embraced his wheels with alacrity, and extended his ‘walking’ season.
During this magnificent recent run of sunny spring days, we set out together – I was walking, he scooting – for an ambitious mile to Horstead Church and the River Bure in Norfolk.
‘I feel not quite with it,’ he said, as he motored along Mill Lane.
But he seemed on fine form. He paused beside a crumbling brick wall to inspect ‘an eye-level weed’ bursting into creamy flower. Hairy bittercress. He still identifies more plants than I can; still hears bird song I miss.
Chiffchaffs called from high boughs as we reached the busy main road. After six months of trouble-free scooting, Dad kept veering to the left.
‘Stop!’ I shouted, lunging to remove his thumb from the ‘forward’ lever.
We halted just before a stream of cars, which parted deferentially at the sight of a white-haired old gentleman on a scooter. We trundled on, past The Recruiting Sergeant, a pub we’ve already earmarked for Dad’s wake. He likes to know everything is organised.
When I was a boy, Dad walked faster
than anyone I knew. He scoots in a similar fashion, turning the speed dial up to 11, as in Spinal Tap.
I power-walked to keep pace as we neared the pretty 13th-century flint church. It sits on a wooded slope, leading to a particularly beautiful stretch of river. White doves gathered on the old tithe barn.
We took a grassy route through the churchyard, where Dad will be buried among a succession of snowdrops, daffodils and cow parsley. A great spotted woodpecker ‘chip-chipped’ in the trees as we bumped down a rough, narrow path to the riverside.
He closely examined a mound of a pruned holly. ‘It’s just the perfect place for a song-thrush nest,’ he said, as if he was a boy ‘nesting’ once again.
We sat beside the green river, overhung by willows and sallows, patrolled by pike and kingfishers.
‘I can’t think of anywhere I’d want to be more,’ said Dad. ‘I’d never considered just doing old-age things before. Pottering. Seeing the world in a very different way. It’s constant learning.’
That’s as long as a thought lasts for Dad now. Mostly, he stops mid-sentence, his train of thought disconnecting like a carriage without an engine, freewheeling into a siding until it stops.
We turned for what became a fraught journey home. Dad carried on veering to the left. He crashed off the kerb. I worried he was no longer safe to go out alone. And he didn’t.
A few days later, he fell – onto his left side, naturally – and broke his hip. He survived an operation, and hospital, and is now recovering at home. He needs a sling and a hoist to move. He won’t shuffle or scoot again.
I took him out in a wheelchair the other day, though, and he was still marvelling at the song of a Cetti’s warbler, the vivid green leaves of spring and the warmth of the sun on his face.
Park at Horstead Church, what3words: rocks.deserved.chariots. Walks include a little loop and longer riverside walk north-west to Mayton Bridge and back via Coltishall
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QThe pills do work
I have been prescribed pills for depression for years now. They have improved my life immeasurably. My doctor suggested I try to come off them, and I’m finding it really difficult. I have tried to withdraw gradually and take one every other day, but I still feel terrible.
I’m now 84 and I would rather live a short and happy life than a long and miserable one. I have been back to my doctor, but he is insistent that I persevere. What can I do? Nothing else works. Harriet B, Canterbury
AThis is a big problem with doctors. They put you on the pills that initially are marvellous – and then, when they want you to come off them, you can’t.
I feel this is very irresponsible, but doctors are terrified that, at your age, you may suffer some life-threatening side effect and they’d be blamed.
First, try to go along with it. Buy a pill-cutter (available at any chemist) and use it to cut your pills into minuscule slices. If you withdraw slowly enough – reducing by only a sliver, one month at a time – you may be lucky. If they’re capsules full of little grains, empty them out and reduce that way. You can buy empty gel capsules on the internet.
Or you might just prefer to continue to take them, despite possible consequences. Better, surely, to live a slightly shorter but happier life, than to extend it by perhaps only a few months, probably, and live in misery.
If you argue your case cogently, and explain the real dangers of crippling depression, your doctor might relent and continue to prescribe. Otherwise, find a doctor who will. You might be lucky.
Ask Virginia
virginia ironside
Only connect
QMy old friend from public school has just told me he’s learned he’s going to die in a couple of months. After hearing this news, I’ve been unable to be in touch with him – just when he probably needs me most. I feel frightened of saying the wrong thing. Or I might burst into tears. I just want to bury my head in the sand until it’s over. Have you any ideas?
Fred
W, Carlisle
AA few ‘don’ts’ first. Don’t say, ‘But you’re looking so well.’ Don’t say, ‘Miracles can happen.’ Don’t say, ‘Never give up hope.’ Don’t say, ‘Well, you look terrific’! Acknowledge your fearful feelings and acknowledge his too. If you can’t do this in person, write him a letter. Tell him how much he’s meant to you – it’s important for dying people to feel they haven’t lived their lives in vain. Tell him how he will always live on inside you and how much difference he has made to your life. If you want, tell him how glad you are he will be there waiting for you when you die.
And ask how, when he is gone, you can continue to be his friend, even in death. Perhaps he’d like you to stay in touch with his partner, or children, or even to care for a pet. That way, you can plan for a future together, even though it will be very different from the one you expected. Is there anything he’d specially like mentioned at his funeral? Or are there any delicious things he’d like you to get him during the last days? Try, as best you can, to keep your connection going.
Mum’s age rage
QMy mother has always been difficult and now she’s older she’s become intolerable. She’s 70 and
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she’s become petulant, demanding and resentful and blames me for everything. I have always been terrified of her rages, and now is worse than ever. What can I do?
Name and address supplied
ARage is often inspired by terror. The more scared ragers are, the bigger the explosion. Don’t respond with fear or anger. Try to remain calm and in charge at all times. What most of us don’t realise is that such rages almost certainly terrify your mother as much as you. She’s not going to remain level-headed and cool – she can’t, she’s out of control. So, however difficult you find it, you have to be the strong one.
When I was young, I had a Scottish headmistress – a terrifying figure who said very little and who could show her disapproval by a glance. When I’m cornered by a rager, I try to access her.
I pull myself up straight and look my victim in the eye. ‘Stop this appalling behaviour at once!’ I say. ‘I won’t stand for it. You are a grown woman behaving like a spoilt child. If you continue, I will leave the room/house. Life is difficult enough for all of us without you throwing such an indulgent tantrum.’
Something along those lines, freighted with disgust, disapproval and dismissiveness, may have the desired effect. You may find she bursts into tears. If not, she will be secretly grateful that you, at least, have stood up to her when she is too frightened to control herself.
Please email me your problems at problempage@theoldie.co.uk; I will answer every email – and let me know if you’d like your dilemma to be confidential.
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