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34 Postcards from the Edge
Mary Kenny
37 Small World
Jem Clarke
38 Oldie Man of Letters A N Wilson
39 School Days
Sophia Waugh
40 I Once Met … Lemmy from Motörhead Joel Hancock
40 Memory Lane
Gilbert Lewthwaite
42 God
Sister Teresa
42 Memorial Service: Sir John
Nott James Hughes-Onslow
43 The Doctor’s Surgery
Dr Theodore Dalrymple
44 Readers’ Letters
46 History David Horspool
47 Commonplace Corner
47 Rant: Latecomers
Liz Hodgkinson
83 Crossword
85 Bridge Andrew Robson
85 Competition Tessa Castro
90 Ask Virginia Ironside
Books
48 The Colonel and the King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley and the Partnership that Rocked the World, by Peter Guralnick Andrew M Brown
Editor Harry Mount
Sub-editor Penny Phillips
Art editor Michael Hardaker
Supplements
editor Charlotte Metcalf
Editorial assistant Amelia Milne
Publisher James Pembroke
Patron saints Jeremy Lewis, Barry Cryer
At large Richard Beatty
Our Old Master
David Kowitz
49 To the Sea by Train: The Golden Age of Railway Travel, by Andrew Martin
Mark Palmer
51 Nothing but Wickedness: The Delusions of Our Culture, by Theodore Dalrymple Mary Killen
53 How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir, by Molly Jong-Fast Charles Elton
55 Larry: A New Biography of Lawrence Durrell 1912-45, by Michael Haag
Thomas W Hodgkinson
57 The Pentecost Papers, by Ferdinand Mount
Frances Wilson Arts
58 Film: Hill
Harry Mount
59 Theatre: The Constant Wife
William Cook
60 Radio
Valerie Grove
60 Television
Frances Wilson
61 Music
Richard Osborne
62 Golden Oldies
Mark Ellen
63 Exhibitions
Huon Mallalieu
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Pursuits
65 Gardening David Wheeler
65 Kitchen Garden
Simon Courtauld
66 Cookery Elisabeth Luard
66 Restaurants
James Pembroke
67 Drink Bill Knott
68 Sport Jim White
68 Motoring Alan Judd
70 Digital Life Matthew Webster
70 Money Matters Neil Collins
73 Bird of the Month: Whinchat John McEwen
Travel
74 Hougoumont, the start of Waterloo Harry Mount
76 Overlooked Britain: the John Rylands Library, Manchester Lucinda Lambton
79 On the Road: Nigel Havers Louise Flind
81 Taking a Walk: Grantchester Meadows Patrick Barkham
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Front cover: Peter Sellers and Britt Ekland in 1964. ANL/Shutterstock
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The Old Un’s Notes
Fawlty Towers is the Torquay version of Hotel California. You can check out any time, but you can never leave.
Fawlty Towers was first aired on BBC 2 50 years ago –on 19th September 1975. And John Cleese’s dysfunctional hotel lives on today.
As well as all the box sets and T-shirts, there’s the recent, hugely popular stage play that adapts three episodes of the original series into a single storyline.
One way or another, the place has come a long way from the gloomy report of the show’s first script editor, who pronounced Fawlty Towers ‘as dire as its title’, and couldn’t see it being ‘anything but a disaster’ – wisdom to rank with that of the White Star Line manager who deemed the Titanic unsinkable, or the Decca Records boss who turned down the Beatles.
Part of the show’s enduring appeal lies in its deft treatment of the British class system. Cleese’s Basil Fawlty follows in a line, from Tony Hancock and Harold Steptoe, of comic misfits who nurse frustrated social ambitions.
He’s obsequious with guests he thinks he should impress, such as Lord Melbury, the con-man guest and fake toff, and mockingly superior with everyone else.
There’s also the wonderfully observed world of the hotel itself. For those of us of a certain age, Fawlty
Among this month’s contributors
Roger Lewis (p14) is author of Erotic Vagrancy: Everything about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, soon to be a TV series. His The Life and Death of Peter Sellers was made into a hit feature film.
Ian La Frenais (p21), with Dick Clement, wrote some of our finest TV comedies, including The Likely Lads, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, Porridge and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet
Ettie Neil-Gallacher (p22) writes about trying to swim the Channel on the 150th anniversary of Captain Webb’s doing it for the first time. She is a teacher and freelance writer, landlocked in London.
Mary Killen (p30 and p51) and her husband, Giles Wood, are Oldie columnists. They wrote The Diary of Two Nobodies and Country Life: A Story of Peaks and Troughs.
Towers brings back all the partly farcical, partly squalid reality of what it felt like to be at the sharp end of the typical British consumer experience of the mid-1970s.
Add the classic sitcom ingredient of a group of ill-matched characters forced to live together, the manic physicality, and the letterperfect writing and editing, and it’s no wonder we’re all happily in residence a halfcentury after we first registered under the owner’s beady eye.
Appearing on Radio Oldie, the writer, singer and taste guru Nicky Haslam pondered on the effects of his childhood polio.
Nicky called himself one of the ‘pre-Salk’ generation – as in Jonas Salk (1914-95), the American who invented the polio vaccination in 1955.
Having contracted polio in 1946, aged seven, Nicky, 85, said he was pumped so full of penicillin that he’s had an in-built health defence mechanism ever since.
Confined to bed for months on end, Nicky was also confined to the company of grown-ups, he says – leading to an early understanding of the joys of sophisticated conversation.
Other pre-Salk polio toughies include the late Lord Snowdon, the late antiques dealer Christopher Gibbs and the writer and tree expert Thomas Pakenham.
Might their childhood perils have set them up to face life’s slings and
Service without a smile: Basil Fawlty (John Cleese), 1975
arrows with rare fortitude and success?
Oasis tribute band very much like the real thing Hampshire Chronicle
Residents ‘can’t open windows’ from overwhelming takeaway smell Lincolnshire Echo
New book on sale Eastern Daily Press Important stories you may have missed
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Formalities are fraying at the House of Lords. During a debate on terrorism, former Tory MP and Chief Whip Lord Harper tried to intervene on a speech by the Greens’ Lady Jones.
She refused him the opportunity, saying, ‘No, sweetie.’
Sweetie! Harper, not one to take himself unseriously, almost popped with annoyance.
The Old Un doffs his trilby to George Cole (1925-2015), of Minder fame, who would have turned 100 this year.
It’s a testament to the skill Cole brought to the role of the wheeling and dealing Arthur Daley that the character could be widely loved by both ends of the political spectrum.
To lefties, he was the ultimate rogue trader set loose by the spirit of Thatcherite entrepreneurism. To Tories, he was a cheeky wideboy who may have skirted the rules but remained an endearingly old-fashioned Englishman at heart.
‘Cliffy Richard’s still around, still a bachelor boy,’ Arthur informs a long-lost friend fresh out of the nick, by way of bringing him up to speed with the times.
Watching Minder today is to be reminded of a largely vanished Britain, where people still used phone boxes, smoked real cigarettes, and drove petrol-guzzling cars down empty streets before parking right in front of their destinations.
All sides agreed that Arthur Daley was a brilliant comic invention, even if you might have seen fit to count your spoons had he dropped in for tea.
The versatile Cole tackled a wide variety of other roles, from appearing in Laurence Olivier’s Henry V (1944) to playing a rough draft of Arthur Daley as shady
businessman Flash Harry in four St Trinian’s films between 1954 and 1966. In Scrooge (1951), he played a charming young Ebeneezer Scrooge to Alastair Sim’s old Ebeneezer Scrooge.
Cole had first appeared with Sim in Cottage to Let (1941), when he was only 15. Sim, his mentor, took Cole in to stay with his family until he was 27. Cole, born in Tooting and adopted, had had a tricky childhood. Sim, he said, was responsible for his career.
Fastidiously polite and self-effacing in real life, Cole was always at pains to distance himself from his most famous screen creation.
He called Arthur ‘a dreadful character; he behaved terribly to people who got in the way of him making a quick quid – and yet the audience still loved him’.
On the other hand, he knew a nice little earner when he saw it.
‘Right at the top,’ Cole said, when asked where he rated Arthur Daley in his 70-yearlong career.
His countless fans will echo the sentiment.
Israeli Opposition leader Yair Lapid made quite an impression giving evidence to the Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee.
Was it something he said? Not exactly.
Committee members Uma Kumaran, Edward Morello and Abtisam Mohamed were later overheard cooing over how devilishly good-looking Lapid was.
A raised glass to Pete Murray, one of the pioneers of pop-music broadcasting, who celebrates his 100th birthday on 19th September.
Murray’s disc-jockey career dates back to the days of the English service of Radio Luxembourg in the late 1940s. Following that, he joined the BBC Light Programme.
On TV, he was seen on a variety of music shows which helped define their generation, among them Six-Five Special, Juke Box Jury, Thank Your Lucky Stars and, latterly, Top of the Pops.
Murray could act a bit, too, appearing in a number of modestly budgeted British films in the 1950s and ’60s. As if not already busy enough, he also did Christmas pantomime, hosted radio and TV panel games, and found time for the Eurovision Song Contest.
‘Good days,’ he once told the Old Un, ‘and whatever you GETTY
Dear Arfur: George Cole (1925-2015) in Minder, 1984
Sorry I’m late – it was murder on the Orient Express
hear about showbusiness, most of the people you met were nice enough.’
Even Jimmy Savile had had a certain charm, Murray added. ‘The kids back then absolutely adored him, although of course you later heard how appalling he really was.’
The BBC dropped Murray from its line-up in late 1983, when he was 58, describing his style of broadcasting as too old-fashioned. An appearance on Breakfast Time earlier that year, in the run-up to the general election, may not have helped his cause.
‘A vote for Labour is a vote for communism,’ Murray announced on air. ‘May God have mercy on your soul if you don’t vote Conservative.’
Murray was back on the airwaves as recently as Boxing Day 2022, faultlessly copresenting a two-hour show on the golden-oldies network Boom Radio.
Surely it’s high time we recognised this icon of British broadcasting with a knighthood?
‘May I sniff the cork?’
Writer and Oldie contributor Daisy Waugh has a new novel out. In Anarchy! Ozias Plume Saves the World, terminally gloomy tech billionaire Ozias Plume catches a laughing virus that makes him see the funny side of life. The virus spreads round the world, leaving miserable Britain in fits of laughter.
Daisy knows whereof she speaks, coming from Britain’s funniest family, ranging from her grandfather Evelyn Waugh to her late brother Alexander Waugh and his
father-in-law, Alexander Chancellor, sainted former editor of The Oldie
Her late father, Auberon Waugh, was a founding contributor to The Oldie. He understood more than anyone the extraordinary power of laughter – not least as delivered by P G Wodehouse, celebrated in those pages 50 years after his death in 1975, aged 93.
It was in a 1973 anthology, Homage to P G Wodehouse, that Auberon Waugh called Wodehouse the master of ‘the Great English Joke’. That meant, he wrote, ‘All seriousness – personal, religious, political – is reduced to absurdity … the best jokes completely ignore everything in which men of authority try to interest us.’
It was when Waugh came across his older daughter, Sophia Waugh – The Oldie’s School Days columnist – as a girl, howling with laughter at Wodehouse, that he realised she understood the key to a happy existence – the Great English Joke.
Another master of the Great English Joke was Barry Cryer (1935-2022), the comedian, writer and MC of The Oldie’s Literary Lunches.
And now his son Bob Cryer is to make a film about Barry and his ten favourite jokes.
Bob says, ‘The film brings together some of the best-loved jokes Dad told over the years – the ones that have made us laugh for a long time, and made him laugh for even longer.’
The film is to be called, simply, Joke. The Old Un can’t wait.
When ITV aired Series 4 of The Avengers on 28th September 1965, it was
bounder running a private Hellfire Club in A Touch of Brimstone
been the success of The Avengers – or at least a great part of it.’
Emma Peel’s backstory was that she was a pilot’s widow. Diana Rigg would have been ‘much happier if they had told me I’d eaten my husband’.
The Avengers worked best when Rigg carried the narrative, most notably in The House That Jack Built, The Joker and Murdersville. Mrs Peel was always more than a match for various cads, including Peter Wyngarde’s
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.
‘When I say mind,’ said the blood relation, ‘I refer to the quarter-teaspoonful of brain which you might possibly find in her head if you sank an artesian well.’ Jeeves in the Offing (1960)
world shared his feelings.
Norman Tebbit, who has died at 94, was taught to windsurf by an acquaintance of the Old Un.
Tebbit was a plucky character and, despite being well into later middle age, he soon picked up the basics while on a yachting holiday.
One day a topless woman passed the boat on her windsurfer. Tebbit was soon on his own board, in hot pursuit, before his instructor could shout the words ‘But I haven’t taught you how to change direction, Norman!’
Sure enough, when the topless lovely turned in the breeze and travelled back the other way, Norman could only gaze back in forlorn frustration while his craft whooshed ever onwards to the distant horizon.
The gentleman would have been for turning, but didn’t know how.
The Oldie August 2025 7
Gyles Brandreth’s Diary
My sure-fire tip for Royal Ascot
I’m not a betting man but my brilliant ruse left me in the black
I learnt something quite important at Royal Ascot this year. A gentleman does not wear his top hat at a jaunty angle, however roguish and amusing he may think it makes him look. He wears it straight up or not at all.
I am grateful to the lady who taught me this. A noted Irish owner and breeder, she did it with a smile and a twinkle, shortly after I had won ten pounds off her.
I had been explaining to her that I wouldn’t be able to back her horse in the next race because, knowing next to nothing about racing, I have a rule that I only ever back horses ridden by Ryan Moore, the champion jockey who has never let me down.
‘I bet you can’t make Ryan smile,’ said the lady.
Ryan Moore is a genius in the saddle, though he has a reputation for being a touch taciturn and straight-faced off it. But he smiled for me and I won the bet – see the picture. Enjoy the picture. It’s the last time you’ll see me wearing my hat like that.
Happily, I had got my hat straight by the time I chanced to meet the King at Royal Ascot. I complimented him on his pink waistcoat. He told me he was relieved to see I wasn’t wearing a knitted one.
I told him I was backing his horse, Purple Rainbow, in the fifth race. ‘Good luck,’ he said.
In the event, His Majesty’s horse (ridden by Warren Fentiman) didn’t quite come last. (To be fair, Ryan Moore did not do too well in that race, either. You can’t win ’em all.)
Next on my perambulations at Royal Ascot, I encountered the actor Nigel Havers (interviewed on page 79) – now 73, but still looking a young 53, and still as effortlessly charming as he is annoyingly handsome.
The charm isn’t a pose. That’s simply
All smiles: Gyles and Ryan Moore, Ascot
how he is. I imagine he is like it even when he is alone.
I hate brushing my teeth in the morning because I catch sight of my face in the bathroom mirror. It makes for a grim and depressing start to the day.
I reckon Nigel gets a lovely boost every time he sees himself in the mirror in the morning. ‘Good morning, old bean, good to see you.’
Gerald Harper, the Nigel Havers of his day, has just died, aged 96.
I got to know him when he was at the height of his fame, in the early 1970s, starring in a TV series called Hadleigh. He played a silky smooth, lady-killing, caddish country squire to near perfection, and an audience of 17 million tuned in to watch the series every week for seven years.
In 1974, I produced him on stage in a revival of a 1950s West End hit, The Little Hut. Robert Morley and David Tomlinson had starred in the original.
I had James Villiers and Gerald Harper in their roles, with the matchless and adorable Geraldine McEwan as the leading lady. We opened at the New Theatre in Oxford – and,
unfortunately, on the opening night Gerald lost his nerve.
Half an hour before the curtain was due to rise, Gerald sat whimpering in his dressing room, telling me it was all too much for him. He wasn’t ready. He wasn’t up to it. He couldn’t go on.
I did my best to bolster him, telling him how wonderful he was, how the audience would warm to him because his personality was so warm etc – to no avail.
And then, 15 minutes before curtainup, my assistant director and friend Noel Davis (also an actor) came into Gerald’s dressing room and took command of the situation. Noel told Gerald to pull himself together.
As Gerald went on whimpering, Noel slapped him sharply across the face. ‘If you don’t go out there and give the performance of a lifetime, you’ll never work again.’
Gerald went out – and did his best. He was fine. He simply was not in the same league as Geraldine McEwan and James Villiers. Nor Nigel Havers, for that matter.
But he had charm – and staying power. The last time I saw him, not that long ago, he was playing an elderly judge in a touring production of an Agatha Christie murder mystery. He looked as elegant as ever.
Because I have never had the looks of a Havers or a Harper, I regard my bathroom mirror as my enemy, not my friend.
That’s why I tend not to have the lights full-on when I am brushing my teeth. And that’s why the other night I squeezed Voltarol instead of toothpaste onto my toothbrush.
I know I must be getting older. I couldn’t tell the difference.
Gyles Brandreth’s Somewhere, a Boy and a Bear, a biography of A A Milne and Winnie-the-Pooh, is out in September
Grumpy Oldie Man
Sparks still fly
The 1970s band are thrilling in concert in their late seventies
matthew norman
For those of us plagued by doubt about the purpose of human existence once we’re entrenched in middle age (quite the columnar Mrs Mopp, am I not?), an antidote is discovered.
His name may be unfamiliar to you. But you may well recall the judder of astonishment occasioned by first exposure to him.
It was so long ago that even this precocious little bleeder, whose midlife crisis struck at 19, hadn’t succumbed to age-related existential Weltschmerz
One Thursday evening in 1974, at glam rock’s high tide, John Peel introduced perhaps the most singular band ever to grace Top of the Pops
The camera panned between an unfeasibly pretty, curly-haired lead singer and the keyboard player beside him. The latter sat behind his instrument, wholly static but for the movement of his fingers and a sporadic sideways flick of the eyes to flash a Hitlerian death stare at his partner.
More than half a century on, Sparks not only are still going, but are every inch as good, at least, as ever they were. Their latest record, Mad!, reached number two in the UK, the highest of any of their now 28 studio albums.
And not long ago, my cousin Nick, a man of unimpeachable musical taste, kindly treated me to a gig in front of 3,500 worshippers in Hammersmith. They were magnificent by any standard. But, without my wishing to patronise the elderly – hardly a smart move in this of all journals – given their ages, they were astounding.
Sparks – Russell and Ron Mael – in 1974
Within moments, so legend relates, John Lennon was dialling a former colleague. ‘You won’t believe what’s on the television,’ he reportedly told Ringo Starr. ‘Marc Bolan is playing a song with Adolf Hitler.’
If the penny is still in flight, let it be stated that the band was Sparks (Californian by birth and present residence, but unmistakably British in tone and sensibilities).
The record was the thrillingly codoperatic ‘This Town Ain’t Big Enough for Both of Us’, the pretty boy singer Russell Mael, and the unnerving doppelgänger at his side his elder brother, Ron.
None who saw it will have forgotten the shock expressed in that inter-Beatle phone call. Encountering the Führer on TOTP? Even John Lennon hadn’t imagined that.
Russell is a spry 76, while on 12th August –the glorious 12th, indeed – Ron turns 80. The toothbrush ’tache has thinned and receded so that you couldn’t confuse a Sparks gig with a Nuremberg rally now. The talent has not.
Of course other, and older, titans are still strutting their stuff. Jagger at 81 looks as if he keeps one of those rejuvenating alien pods from the movie Cocoon in his pool. But he doesn’t write songs the way he did (and hasn’t since the seventies).
Elton is 78, and still belting out the classics with brio. But as an artist he peaked in the ’70s, during that golden early spell with lyricist Bernie Taupin. Rod Stewart’s fantastic rock voice went some time ago, as his recent Glastonbury turn confirmed. Paul McCartney’s unquestioned genius as both singer and songwriter is also long faded.
Yet here was Russell still nailing every falsetto note with undiminished power. And here is Ron still writing glorious tracks – always witty and seductively
eccentric; sometimes wonderfully poignant – at a prodigious rate.
They played all the hits, none better than 1979’s ‘The Number One Song in Heaven’, their mammothly influential synth-disco masterpiece (and a certain pick should a nuclear holocaust reduce global candidates for Desert Island Discs to one person).
Yet the adoration sweeping from crowd to stage was barely less tangible with the newer stuff. Age cannot wither Russell Mael’s voice, nor custom stale Ron’s infinite lyrical variety. Time hasn’t laid a glove on them.
Apart, perhaps, from Philip Roth, whose second coming produced several mighty novels late in his life, Ron is the only soul I can think of whose artistic energy and brilliance has survived the passage of the decades so undimmed.
How these guys kept going during the various droughts when no recording label would touch them must bewilder those of us whose reflex is to raise the white flag at the first reverse.
I would say it defies explanation, were it not beautifully explained in the documentary film, The Sparks Brothers, directed by Edgar Wright, a superfan, a few years ago. Their passion for music never waned an iota.
One of their British hits was ‘Beat the Clock’, in which, as so often, Ron was way ahead of his time with a sharp satire on the crushing franticness of modern life: ‘Entered school when I was two… Got divorced when I was four…’
Compared with the present insanity, 1979 might have been life in a Dorset village in the cottage next to Thomas Hardy.
But today the title has a different resonance. They have beaten, defied and obliterated the clock, these glimmering beacons of hope for the defeatist old timer, and may the mightiest hand spare them from hearing the number-one song in heaven for eons to come.
who was Frederick Garton?
Fifty years ago, Britain’s food scene was nothing like today’s cornucopia of ingredients and recipes from around the globe.
But at least a legendary brown sauce could add tang to a bacon or corned-beef butty. Why did a largely forgotten Nottingham man invent this 19th-century condiment –which in the 1960s became known as ‘Wilson’s gravy’?
Frederick Gibson Garton, born in 1862, started his working life as a grocer’s apprentice before opening his own shop.
Making pickles and jams as a sideline, he experimented with sauces made from locally supplied vinegar and imported spices. He sold his wares off a handcart which he lugged around the city.
Of all the sauces he developed, the most successful was registered in 1895 as HP Sauce.
Garton got himself into a financial pickle after running up too many unpaid supplier bills. Shrewd
Edwin Samson Moore of the Midland Vinegar Company saw an opportunity, wanting an affordable sauce – made
what is mankeeping?
Mankeeping refers to the ‘emotional labour’ women perform to ‘reduce the burden of men’s isolation’.
The term was coined by two Stanford University psychologists, Angelica Ferrara and Dylan P Vergara, who described it as a ‘component of gender inequality’ in a research paper published late last year.
The core idea is that heterosexual men are terrible at maintaining their own social networks. We let things drift with once dear friends. We leave WhatsApp threads dangling.
Even if we do, miraculously, make it to the pub, all we do is exchange Alan Partridge quotes and describe guitar solos – failing to enquire after the health of Tom’s mum or t0 ask whether he has a girlfriend.
with in-house vinegar – for his company to sell.
In 1903, he offered to pay off the grocer’s debt, plus a one-off payment of £150, in return for ownership of F G Garton & Co’s sauces, pickles and chutneys. From then on, Garton refused to have the sauce in his house, and got upset and angry when asked by his son about it. It was originally called Garton’s HP Sauce, but the Midland Vinegar Company later dropped the inventor’s name.
It’s still somewhat of a mystery what the initials HP on the bottle meant. One legend says they’re the initials of Harry Palmer, who some believe sold the recipe to Garton.
Others say it’s a reference to the Houses of Parliament pictured on the label.
Mrs Garton
HP stands for Houses of Parliament –or does it?
reputedly told one of Moore’s salesmen it was a tribute to Harold Pink, whose company supplied spices for the sauce.
As well as sporting a picture of parliament, HP Sauce gained a further connection to politics.
Mary Wilson – wife of the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson – said he added it to much of his food – hence ‘Wilson’s Gravy’. She said, ‘If Harold has a fault, it is that he will drown everything with HP Sauce.’
In 1970, Private Eye began a regular feature called HP Sauce – still going today.
Ownership was sold to what is now Kraft Heinz in 2005. To much dismay and protest, production was moved from the Aston factory to the Netherlands in 2007, severing a longstanding link with its traditional home in the Midlands. But the Nottingham grocer’s legacy still has a place on many dinner tables.
As for me, a dollop on a pork pie is simple food heaven.
Dene Bebbington
It’s left men feeling lonely and isolated. One YouGov poll found that 18 per cent of British men did not have a best friend, while 32 per cent had no one they would even call a close friend.
And so it falls to the women in these men’s lives to organise the barbecues, keep up with the school parents, arrange weekends – and mop up the emotional discharge that seeps out when men fail to support one another properly.
As it happens, there was once a textbook mankeeping incident in my friendship group.
It began with my university mate Dan sending out an email complaining how we guys never saw each other any more and proposing a boys-only paintballing expedition as a remedy.
It later transpired that the email had been drafted by his girlfriend who was fed up with him hanging around the flat.
Still, I feel honour-bound to push back against the idea that if men don’t socialise in the ways women do, there’s something wrong with them.
I kick a football around with a bunch of creaking 40-somethings most Sundays, and jam at my mate Joe’s house every other Wednesday. We rarely have ‘deep meaningful conversations’ while performing these ‘surface-level activities’. But that doesn’t mean these activities are not deep and meaningful. I always emerge wonderfully refreshed.
I also wonder how many hours of emotional labour men put in listening to women detail the ups, downs, ins and outs of their female friendships.
Ah, but let’s not get defensive! What the science seems to be telling us here is that we should spend more time down the pub – advice it would be foolish to ignore.
Richard Godwin
No matter how diligent the research or big the book, there’s no such thing as a definitive biography. There’ll always be tales one never knew, fascinating trails one failed to follow.
Only the other day, for example, thanks to the writer Craig Raine, I discovered that a surprising Peter Sellers fan was T S Eliot. Deep down in The Collected Prose Volume Four: 1951-1966, the poet opined, ‘Peter Sellers is certainly very versatile. I admired very much his work in I’m All Right Jack. And I have a gramophone record in which he does a surprising variety of turns.’
And, of course, what was The Waste Land other than a surprising variety of different turns or voices, allusions, styles, sketches. The American Eliot was also always disguising himself – playing possum – as the English gent, the High
Church Anglican, the aesthete dabbed with face powder.
What to this day I love about Sellers (who would have turned 100 on September 8) is that the performing didn’t stop when the cameras were put away.
He and Spike Milligan used to dress up as Nazi stormtroopers and drive a tank around Piccadilly, for the hell of it. Sellers once took a live goat up to his Dorchester suite, threatening to barbecue it in the bathroom, for the fun of it – and to outrage the hotel’s owner, the Sultan of Brunei.
The Goon was permanently on the go, assuming funny accents, organising practical jokes. He retained a New York lawyer called Solomon Finger, so that he could threaten to give adversaries ‘the Finger’. He looked through every phone book in the world in the hope of finding a dwarf lawyer called Shrift, so he could give people ‘short Shrift’.
Peter Sellers, the mad genius
His biographer, Roger Lewis, salutes the crazy, monstrous, brilliant actor on his centenary
He would visit the cockpit of a jumbo jet after a long-haul flight to tip the pilot – as if he’d simply been riding in a London cab. He’d send Hollywood producers his laundry for dry-cleaning.
Sellers was a great pricker of pomposity and solemnity. When he was divorcing Britt Ekland, he invited his legal team to a conference aboard his yacht, moored in Venice. The lawyers arrived to be met by Sellers who, attired as a decrepit bus conductor, insisted they buy a ticket from his little ticket machine before being allowed up the gang plank.
He then disappeared and re-emerged immaculately attired in a navy blazer with brass buttons, and talked like Cary Grant. No mention was made of the ‘Any more fares, please?’ antics of moments before.
Dressing up and convincing himself he was somebody else began early. I once received a letter from a retired Norfolk
CID Inspector. Soon after the war, he was summoned to a hotel in Norwich, where he was shown an entry in the register –Lord Beaconsfield – which had been made by a scruffy young man who did not seem convincingly aristocratic.
Sellers, sauntering across the foyer, was asked if he’d accompany the police to his room, where it was explained to him that Lord Beaconsfield – that’s to say, Disraeli – never left an heir and the title was defunct. Sellers, unflustered, said he’d nevertheless claimed the title through a female line of the family.
Eventually, he admitted his true identity. The police, having glanced at the small cardboard suitcase filled with dirty socks and Woodbines, advised him to scarper, which he did. Sellers, telling this story years later, maintained the hotel staff had fallen for his upper-crust performance – when, in fact, the maids thought him pathetic and the head porter nearly died laughing.
When the CID Inspector telephoned
the Met, to double-check about this Sellers person, he was told that the assuming-false-identities tricks were well-known, and that the carryings-on had reached such a pitch that a very real attempt had been made by the authorities to have Sellers certified.
It is commonly said of Sellers that he was a spoilt brat, prone to eccentricity, who went off the rails when he found fame – and, surely, we’d all go a bit bananas if given full creative control and millions to do with as we pleased on a movie set.
To discover, however, that well before Sellers, so to speak, became Sellers, the police wanted him locked up for ever in a rubber room … does this make things start to fall into place, or fall into place more loudly and incontrovertibly?
What about, for instance, the thousands of love letters he sent to his first girlfriend, Hilda Parkin?
These came to light only after my book was first published in 1994.
Heaps and heaps of adolescent pleadings and maunderings, with Sellers sometimes writing six times a day, imploring Hilda to marry him. He was hypermanic, obsessional.
Britt Ekland, too, received crazy, repetitive missives, expressing alternately eternal love and a morbid, possessive jealousy. Today, Sellers would be diagnosed with any number of psychological ailments, from bipolarity to ADHD, from neurodiversity to schizophrenia.
When an insurance company had a clear-out and sent dead clients’ dossiers to the furnace, Sellers’s file was salvaged and sent to me – the medical reports and electrocardiogram printouts conducted on behalf of studios who needed indemnification, each time Sellers was contracted to make a film.
Sad to say, from 1964 onwards, when he first had a series of heart attacks, which damaged his brain and gave him blackouts, Sellers was always expected to blow a microchip mid-production and die. His health-insurance coverage staggered from one six-week shoot to the next. It must have been terrible for him, having to conceal the threat of mortality, having to turn up on the set and be funny, hilarious, a comic genius.
No wonder he lived for the moment, unable really to know whether he’d feel ebullient or downcast, hysterical or morose. His mood would change from sunny to murderous in the space of a sentence.
Evidence bearing this out comes from Alana Scott, who contacted me from California. She met Sellers in 1969, when she was working for Creative Management Associates.
Dispatched to attend the star at
As Fred Kite in I’m All Right Jack, 1959
As Chief Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther Strikes Again (1976)
home in Clarges Street, Alana was alarmed first by Sellers’s attitude to his children, Sarah and Michael, who were shut in a back office and not allowed in the front room to watch the telly.
When Victoria, then a baby, ventured into her father’s quarters, Sellers started screaming at the Swedish nanny, ‘I told you she’s not allowed out of her room!’
As Alana said, as if recounting a Victorian ghost story, ‘The child was in the house for some time after, but I never saw her again.’
Sellers then grew angry when he saw Alana looking at a photograph of Britt and the baby, a picture that had been printed in all the newspapers.
‘He flipped out and started screaming at me. “I want her out! I want her out,” he ranted, before running away himself.’
He came back, his butlers and factotums having calmed him down. Sellers began dictating a letter and when Alana glanced up from her pad, ‘There
When Simon Williams acted with Sellers, the ailing star flipped from deep gloom to comic mayhem
Iwas in two of Peter Sellers’s last three films – The Prisoner of Zenda (1979) and The Fiendish Plot of Dr Fu Manchu (1980). They were both turkeys, as it turned out.
Between those two, he made Being There (1979) and won a Golden Globe award. As the saying goes, ‘You can fool the world with tragedy, but comedy is serious business.’
Richard Quine, who directed Zenda, had trouble controlling or stimulating Peter. And on Fu Manchu, having fired several directors, Peter took control.
He was in poor health and being run
was an expression on his face I can’t describe. I felt real menace emanating from him … I was in the middle of Mayfair, in the middle of the day, and I was scared. He started going round the sofa faster and faster, leaning toward me as he did so.’
Alana wanted to leave.
‘Don’t you dare leave until I tell you to!’
Nevertheless, she made it to the hall and the front door – Sellers’s breath on the back of her neck.
‘Don’t you walk away from me! No one walks away from me!’
She got into the lift.
Sellers’s face was by now purple. ‘You’ll never work in England again!’ He stamped back to his flat – only to discover he’d locked himself out.
Luckily, the lift started to descend before Sellers could reach Alana with his hands outspread in an effort to strangle her.
Alana left in tears. Piers Haggard, the
ragged by his fourth wife, Lynn Frederick – chaos. On the Panther movies, Blake Edwards learned that, to get the best out of him, you had to shoot fast – Peter got quickly bored.
On Zenda, Peter was impatient and irritable. He was still sore from cosmetic surgery on his neck and the stiff wing collars chafed. Sometimes, to make a scene funnier, he would insist on our all having vitamin B12 injections.
There were fun days with lots of ‘corpsing’ (some of it dutifully faked) and others when he would tear off his wig and moustache and storm off to Switzerland for a week or more.
Our most joyful dinners would have him reminiscing about The Goon Show, his happiest time before all the barmy stardom. The saddest evening was at his private birthday party when there was a no-show from his two children. The evening died a death.
We never knew each day which Peter to expect – upbeat or downcast? The chirpy cockney or the languid aristo (loosely based on Patrick Lichfield)?
At the wrap party for what turned out to be his last day on a film set, I asked him to sign a large photograph of us standing together.
Up my leg, he just wrote, ‘Why is he so tall?’
Simon Williams starred in Upstairs, Downstairs
With daughter Victoria, aged three, in Monte Carlo, 1968
director of Sellers’s final film, The Fiendish Plot of Fu Manchu (1980), was reduced to tears.
Joe McGrath, angered beyond endurance on Casino Royale (1967), threw a punch at the star, and Sellers sent a unique letter of apology.
Did he know how badly he was behaving? To Sellers, the universe was one mad black farce. Even in Alana’s testimony there is an element of farce – Sellers’s being locked out – which underlies the horror: the puce-faced banshee becomes Clouseau.
Sellers could never understand the reality of other people’s feelings. To him, the world was a panto in which he took all the roles: ogre, clown, principal boy.
He’d phone you up full of beans; you’d whizz round to see him – and he’d be ripping the curtains from the wall or throttling a parrot.
‘If you said “Hello” to him in the wrong sort of way, that could set him off,’ Michael Sellers, the eldest son, who died in 2006, told me.
‘If you went into a Victorian lunatic asylum and saw the worst patient in the place, he’d be better off than Peter Sellers,’ Blake Edwards, the Pink Panther director, reflected.
The last time Edwards saw the actor, Sellers was standing motionless –catatonic – in the street in Gstaad, snow piling up on his head, refusing to speak.
A few minutes earlier, he’d been throwing a tantrum; now here he was, shrunk into the little old man from Being There, this isolated nothing person, switched off from the world.
A few months later, in July 1980, aged only 54, he was dead.
Roger Lewis’s The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (riverrun) with a preface by Steve Coogan, is out now
Fritz (Williams) and Sydney Frewin (Sellers) in The Prisoner of Zenda (1979)
Oh, what lovely war tunes
Michael Karam will salute the 80th anniversary of VJ Day with his favourite childhood LP of great movie themes
As the 80th anniversary of VJ Day on 15th August approaches, the old war-movie soundtracks start ringing in my ears – particularly as played by Geoff Love.
Love (1917-91) was a prolific British trombonist, bandleader and composer.
Part of the postwar music scene, he worked with such garlanded artists as Shirley Bassey, Connie Francis, Marlene Dietrich, Vera Lynn, Judy Garland, Frankie Vaughan and Johnny Mathis.
Love also wrote for most of the major record labels. But it is for his film and TV music for the commercially successful budget label MFP (Music For Pleasure) in the late ’60s and early ’70s that he is probably best remembered.
Left: Love’s Big War Movie Themes (1971) Below: Geoff Love, 1955
At the time, we made do with three channels. VCRs were still in their infancy and movie-streaming the stuff of science fiction. So Love allowed us to relive films we couldn’t easily access, through the theme music.
His Big Movie compilations included the themes from the James Bond canon and genre soundtrack compilations from westerns, thrillers and other ’70s blockbusters.
His iconic album, Big War Movie Themes (1971), did not sell as well as the racier Big Bond Movie Themes
But its impact has endured more than that of any other, featuring music from films that were central to the lives of many thousands of schoolboys.
They were woven into the fabric of our imaginations. Love’s orchestra delivered belt-fed, aural adrenalin that fused nostalgia, patriotism and adventure through some of the 20th century’s finest and most memorable scores.
The album included Eric Coates’s The Dam Busters; Ron Godwin’s 633 Squadron and Where Eagles Dare; Dimitri Tiomkin’s The Guns of Navarone; Maurice Jarre’s Lawrence of Arabia, Elmer Bernstein’s The Great Escape and Kenneth Alford’s Colonel Bogey – which taught every schoolboy in the country that Hitler had only one ball.
All this is now deeply unfashionable. But, back in the early ’70s, except for those with Marxist or furiously right-on parents, the Second World War and its endless historical
tropes were very much part of our childhood, in comics, toys and model-making and, of course, on screen and TV.
We were still biffing ‘Jerry’ and bayoneting the ‘Japs’, normally on Sunday afternoons in front of the telly before going back to school.
Later versions of Big War Movie Themes included ‘wimpier’, more modern tunes from The Deer Hunter and The Winds of War, among others.
They were sniffed at by the cognoscenti, wedded to the purity of the original line-up and running order. A Bridge Too Far was the only later theme tune we ‘Love-ites’ believe merits inclusion.
During the war, Love served in the Royal Rifle Corps. Back on civvy street, he would go on to sell over 2.5 million records. On New Year’s Eve 1974, Eamonn Andrews doorstepped him for This Is Your Life.
He died in London, on July 8th 1991, aged 73. A blue plaque sits on the modest terraced house in which he was born in the Yorkshire market town of Todmorden. While the records may languish in charity shops, a generation of schoolboys is still grateful for the memories.
Michael Karam wrote Tears of Bacchus: A History of Wine in the Arab World
Dancing Queen
Eighty years ago, Lady Antonia Fraser, then 12, celebrated VJ Day on the streets of London with Princess Elizabeth, 19
When I arrived at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, in the autumn of 1950, it was as though I were arriving home.
This was because LMH was like a country house in the middle of a green garden on a river – and on this island I always felt that I had been born.
As children, we lived at 8 Chadlington Road, Oxford, more or less throughout the war; while my father – the prison reformer Frank Pakenham, later Lord Longford (1905-2001) – who had been invalided out of the army, exercised his profession as a don at Christ Church.
The next field contained the Dragon School, to which my brother Thomas Pakenham (the tree expert and historian) and I were sent.
All this meant that North Oxford became in our imaginations a kind of rough kingdom. We swam in the river and played rugger on the field, and we were the monarchs – or rather the dragons – of the place.
Sometimes we ventured down into the city, perhaps to steal into our father’s
Princess Elizabeth, the Queen and King, Princess Margaret Rose, VJ Day, 1945
rooms in the quad at Christ Church. Why didn’t he stop us? I don’t think he noticed that we were in the room.
Occasionally, in later years as undergraduates, we got lost going home, turning the wrong way on Magdalen Bridge. That was when an Indian student, whom we approached, said to us with great scorn, ‘There’s only one way to North Oxford.’
‘I think he’s a prince,’ said my friend and fellow student Marigold Hunt (1932-2024) – later Marigold Johnson, the social reformer, married to writer Paul Johnson – with some keenness.
‘Then he’s not a very polite prince,’ said I haughtily. The whole way back to LMH, we argued about the politeness – or lack of it – of princes and whether it was better or worse than in ordinary people.
In the end, Marigold decided to put an end to the discussion. We retraced our steps and found – to Marigold’s joy – the prince (or not), still sitting on his bench.
Nothing if not fearless, she strode towards him, stopped in front and declaimed, ‘I am Marigold.’
The Indian looked up, jumped up and flung himself on the ground before the tiny, very pretty doctor’s daughter.
‘He is a prince,’ said Marigold with great satisfaction, walking in the opposite direction without a backward glance.
The only expeditions Thomas and I made regularly outside Oxford were to Ireland. The journey was long – taxi, train, boat, bus and finally pony cart in order to reach Dunsany Castle, County Meath, home of the writer Lord Dunsany, our great-uncle.
Now and again this meant spending the night in London on the way. One famous occasion turned out to be the night that all the world – as it seemed – celebrated Victory over Japan.
This was so-called VJ Day, 15th August 1945.
On this date Thomas was one day after his 12th birthday, whereas I was 12 for the remaining days of August until the 27th. Then, with a deep sigh of contentment, I moved up to 13 – a year ahead of my brother again. We were born within a calendar year – Irish twins.
The coincidence of birthdays and journey meant that our mother actually booked us into a hotel. Just the two of us! And here was London steaming with rejoicing. I have never forgotten it, and nor has Thomas.
Out into the streets we went roistering. And, the next day, we learnt from the papers that the little Princess Elizabeth had done much the same.
‘We might have met the Corgis,’ said Thomas wistfully.
Antonia Fraser’s The House That Spoke: The History of a Home (Tandem Publishing) is out on 23rd August
The appeal of LA’s recording studios and escaping Britain’s iniquitous tax system led to an exodus of rock musicians to Southern California in the late seventies and early eighties.
That is the reason most of my friends, then and now, were in the music business rather than the movies. Dick Clement and I were ensconced in canyon homes because a Hollywood producer, a lovely man called John Rich, had optioned the American rights to Porridge and brought us across the pond to write it.
I joined a football team – The Exiles. We had a pick-up kickaround on Wednesdays and Saturdays in a park in Beverly Hills next to a fire station.
Sundays were the real deal, when the best of us played in a league consisting of teams from all over the city.
At any given time, one or more of my teammates had a hit single or platinum album in the charts: Rod Stewart; two guys from Yes; Paul Carrack from Ace; Jackie Lomax; Hamish from the Average White Band. And we’d have guest cameos from musos on tour such as ELO’s Jeff Lynne, Jim Capaldi from Traffic and Robert Plant.
There were songwriters on the team, including Billy Lawrie, Lulu’s younger brother. Even Doris, my girlfriend at the time (now wife), was studying audio engineering!
Lionel Conway was, and still is today, a music publisher and best friend of Oldie of the Year Don Black, lyricist of Born Free, Diamonds Are Forever and The Man with the Golden Gun. Don never played – his game was snooker – and, as far as I know, never wrote a song about us.
Ian McShane was one of the few actors who joined the team, Souter Harris came from advertising and our striker Eddie Sanderson was Joan Collins’s favourite photographer.
There was, briefly, a brilliant dribbler from Brazil but, as he never passed the ball, he was designated ‘the wanker’. Sometimes Mexican illegals – gardeners from neigbouring mansions – joined in the kickarounds. These days, they would be playing with one eye on the touchline, in case a vanload of ICE agents pulled up – and the next time they kicked a ball would be in the yard of some awful prison in El Salvador.
One time, at my invitation, Ronnie Wood joined us, wearing borrowed kit and surprising Rod, who couldn’t believe his former Faces pal was actually taking exercise.
At half-time, Woody produced a vial of colourless liquid. He had no idea what it was or where it came from, but we
The LA Pelés
Fifty years ago, Ian La Frenais and Rod Stewart kicked off in California
The Exiles: Ian La Frenais (back row, centre), Rod Stewart (back, far right), Ian McShane (front, far left), LA, 1976
wondered if we should try it. Being young and very foolish, we took a tiny sip each, eschewing the customary orange slices. We played the second half at the frenzied pace of Mack Sennett’s Keystone Cops. To this day, none of us knows what it was.
Rod was a very tasty player, and his presence assured an audience of several sun-tanned, halter-topped girls. The photographs that exist are courtesy of our English cheerleaders Carinthia West and Sabrina Guinness (now Lady Stoppard).
Sometimes, we played other exile teams – Mexicans, Italians and Yugoslavs, the latter leaving us with bruises for weeks. We played on pristine college campuses such as Pepperdine and UCLA, and sun-scorched public parks deep in the San Fernando Valley.
We drove in our ‘formerly used’ convertibles with GB plates. After games, we drank in a pub called the Coach and Horses, which had horse brasses and sold Bass beer. The footie, like the professional game, connected us with home. So did the thought of wet weather, warm beer, English bacon, Morecambe and Wise and the BBC teleprinter, which spewed out football results at 4.45pm (UK time) every winter afternoon.
These were the portable memories we’d brought with us to the surf ’n’ turf of Southern California. We shopped at the
Tudor Rooms, buying cream crackers, Tetley’s tea bags, Branston pickle, marmalade and Marmite. And clunky VHS cassettes of The Benny Hill Show, Fawlty Towers and The Sweeney. We even went, as a team, to the Mayfair Music Hall near Santa Monica Pier, something we would never have contemplated at home.
I played from 1975 to 1981. Then it got very serious, with better players, a better league – and Lionel Conway, head of Island Records, becoming the manager! Rod Stewart kept playing for a while longer. Soccer and rockers – great period.
Age crept up, joints creaked, muscles ached and we finally hobbled off the footie pitch for the golf green or the tennis and pickleball courts.
None of us as far as I recall had ever pursued SoCal sports. None of us knew how to surf, land surf, roller board or roller blade, and we thought frisbee was pointless unless you had a dog. Few of us even swam, except in Rod’s heated pool.
New exiles replaced the old ones, who now sold fewer records and shipped their framed albums and posters, guitars and keyboards back to the UK. And waited patiently until they became ‘legacy’ bands and made other fortunes surfing the nostalgia wave. And could become, I like to think, tax exiles all over again.
Ian La Frenais, with Dick Clement, wrote The Likely Lads, Porridge, Lovejoy and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet
Last year, I failed to swim the Channel.
This isn’t unusual for attempted Channel crossings, but it was particularly devastating after years of training. I was 45.
The blow was softened by the camaraderie of my cheerfully eclectic relay team – a motley crew, ranging in age from 35 to 78, who cut through the swell at bewilderingly different rates. But it was a blow nevertheless, and one I felt particularly keenly as I’d wanted to do it for 40 years.
My mother never learned to swim. So she determined that we would as soon as we could stand. She sourced a series of appropriately sadistic coaches, including a retired Australian special-forces officer, and a vast former Commonwealth medallist. He taught me to dive at the shallow end of the pool, warning that if I got it wrong, the rest of my life would be spent in a wheelchair.
My mother then felt that her job was done, and she was uncharacteristically relaxed about my being in the sea. As she reclined in her deckchair, merrily disassociating on the beach at Eastbourne, I would hurtle for red-flag seas from March to October, when I was
He would then gleefully enrage my mother on the shingle by encouraging me to swim to France.
With the passage of time, Webb’s triumph seems all the more
extraordinary. It was a further 36 years before anyone could replicate it.
A storm thwarted Webb’s first attempt. Covered in porpoise oil and clad in red silk togs, he tried again 12 days
Swimming against the tide
Ettie Neil-Gallacher tried to swim the Channel, 150 years after Captain Webb’s triumph
Main: Webb grabs his claret, 1875. Right: Captain Matthew Webb (1848-83)
later. The conditions he encountered were far rougher than would allow a crossing to be attempted today.
Eight miles from France, the tides forced him to swim parallel to the shore for five hours. But, on 25th August 1875, he finally made it ashore, having swum breaststroke for 39 miles in 21 hours and 45 minutes.
Webb would go on to participate in various aquatic endurance and exhibition events before drowning in 1883 as he tried to swim across the rapids below Niagara Falls to claim a $2,000 prize.
Today, only 20 per cent of attempted Channel crossings succeed. Around 300 people try annually and only 60 make it. Those aren’t quite civil-service fast-track odds, but they’re disheartening.
Webb said, ‘Nothing great is easy.’ But even he might have balked at embarking on the swim today. The process has become eye-wateringly complex, protracted and expensive.
Choosing an association to ratify your crossing and chartering one of their pilot boats are only the first steps.
You have to book a couple of years
in advance, as the slots, from late June until the end of September, get booked up.
While unratified crossings are possible, the most established associations have very strict rules about what you can wear (nothing that offers buoyancy or thermal protection) and what you can slather yourself in (antichafing grease seems to be more popular than goose fat these days) to complete an accredited crossing.
Then there are the rules on setting off from England and touching down in France (France-England crossings stopped in 1993 when nos amis across La Manche objected on safety grounds).
Swimmers can have no physical contact with the boat, apart from sustenance being passed via a feeding stick. While Webb enjoyed beef tea, ale, coffee and cod-liver oil, we had bananas, flapjacks and dehydrated food pouches – every bit as lacking in romance as they sound. Like Webb, we’d had bacon and
You have to reach a certain point before the tide turns. If you haven’t, it’s curtains
eggs for breakfast, but we limply failed to wash them down with claret like him.
Then there’s the cruel element of luck. Our departure was shunted on from a neap tide to a spring tide. You have to reach a certain point before the tide turns; if you haven’t, it’s curtains. You simply don’t make any progress and you get pushed back.
In the end, we were a mile shy of where we needed to be when the tide turned. Infuriating. The water wasn’t cold – just over 16 degrees (slightly colder, though, than it has been at that time of year for the past four years).
Regardless, we were all set for a 1am departure, only for our skipper to call it off an hour beforehand because he thought it too windy. He insisted we’d stand more of a chance the following day when, he gleefully assured us, the sea would be ‘as flat as a witch’s tit’.
In the event, there was quite a swell the next day. As we reached halfway, and despite our enthusiasm for battling on against the turning tide, the skipper called time.
Nothing great is easy, simple or cheap, but it was galling to fail.
Ettie after her swim, heading back to the White Cliffs of Dover
Dickens the authorpreneur
Ambitious writers must become businessmen to succeed.
By Pamela Howarth
Have you come across an authorpreneur recently?
This clumsy portmanteau word sums up the mindset and practice of a new breed of writers.
They treat their careers like a longterm business and oversee all aspects, from brand creation to marketing and, of course, turning a profit.
The marriage of literary and business skills might seem incompatible, but there are many successful authorpreneurs, some earning up to six figures.
This term has been around for a few years now, coined alongside the growth of self-publishing. The unholy alliance of authorship and entrepreneurship wouldn’t have been possible, even 20 years ago, without new digital technology bringing seismic changes to the publishing industry.
You no longer need a publisher to publish a book. Gone are the days when writers searched – often in vain – for a traditional publisher, who would take over the whole, lengthy process, including publicity.
With self-publishing, control has shifted to the individual. You just upload your manuscript onto a site such as
You no longer need a publisher to publish a book
Amazon’s free Kindle Direct and create an ebook and print-on-demand paperback. You’ll get a website listing and higher royalties than those offered by old-school publishers.
For the less confident, there are thousands of new-style vanity publishers who will give you a hand – for a fee. Simples! Or not?
You’ve still got to sell your book, which is probably harder than writing it … hence the need for a start-up business mentality or ‘fire-hose route’, as one author calls it.
Many authorpreneurs go for selfpublishing, by choice or necessity, even if, like E L James (Fifty Shades of Grey), they later acquire traditional deals.
Among the numerous writers who’ve capitalised on this fast-changing industry is Joanna Penn, an Oxford theology graduate and former IT consultant, who pens dark thrillers, inspired by her religious psychology studies.
It doesn’t matter what your author brand is – steamy romance, sci-fi with aliens or something more arcane – but you need to build one!
It’s all part of marketing the product. In the past, even the most reclusive writers usually attended a few booksignings. The entrepreneurial Charles Dickens went on tour, giving solo enactments of the most dramatic scenes in his novels.
Nowadays, authorpreneurs have digital and internet-based communication, as well as traditional media, for the required and relentless self-promotion. You won’t be surprised to learn that a huge sub-industry of courses and books on how to run a book business has emerged.
For example, Jesse Tevelow appeals to those who’d like to pack in the day job and write, in his book Authorpreneur: Build the Brand, Business and Lifestyle You Deserve. He does mention, crucially, that the quality of the writing is vital!
Reader appeal will always be the key to success, the elephant in the room amidst all the business speak.
I do wonder how these overachievers find time to write – and I’m a tad envious, being one of numberless self-published authors whose books stagnate on Amazon’s virtual shelves.
O for a literary agent to appear, like a fairy godmother, and sign me up! Is it sad that writers have to focus on being entrepreneurs? Or is it joyous that the book is still king and anyone can publish one?
Answers on a postcard please, if you know what that is.
Look lovely for longer
Come to
Beauty DAY
Hosted by Mary Killen
Thursday 25th September 2025 at The National Liberal Club, 1 Whitehall Place, London SW1A 2HE
njoy a leisurely day of talks, demonstrations and one-to-one discussions on how to tackle the most instantly treatable beauty setbacks that afflict oldies. Enjoy ready access to the experts – all the while laughing with others in the luxury of one of London’s most desirable clubs, set on the Embankment.
Mary Killen ONLY 40 PLACES
ITINERARY
10am Tea/Coffee
10.15am Welcome from Mary Killen, Oldie fashion-writer
10.30 Session 1 – Workout with Dean Javeed
The Oldie publisher’s personal trainer will show us the famous 11-minute Prince Philip workout
10.50am Session 2 – Reflexology with Harriet Combes
11.20am Tea/Coffee break with reflexology treatments
11.40am Session 3 – Facial massage with Lucinda Wallop and a talk about beauty inside and out
12.30am Session 4 – Swift removal of unsightly lumps and bumps with Mat thew Potter, plastic surgeon
1.00pm Healthy buffet lunch with wine
During the lunch break you can visit the experts around the room and enjoy reflexology
2.00pm Session 5 – Bra-fitting with Rigby & Peller: the importance of professional bra-size measurement and the transformative power of comfortable corsetry
2.35pm Session 6 – Talk and make-up demonstration using Veil Cosmetics by make-up artist Rae Denman. Veil Cover Cream was founded in 1949. Veil is the best and most weightless product to cover scar tissue, brown age spots, blue and red veins and even tattoos
3.10pm Session 7 – Dental implants with cosmetic dentist Dr Pratik Patel
3.40pm Tea/Coffee break
4.15pm Session 8 – Toppers and wigs with Robert Frostick of Mandeville London for thinning hair
4.45pm Chance to wander
5.30pm Depart
The price for the day is £225 per person (incl VAT), and includes a healthy buffet lunch with wine and a goody bag. To book a place, please email Katherine at katherineg@jppublishing.co.uk
MOVE Reserve before 30th September 2025 and enjoy an easy move package worth up to
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Pumping for joy
Quentin Letts longs for the days of helpful petrol-pump attendants
My mother, aged 90, is still driving her immaculately maintained Renault Modus, and with commendable caution and skill.
There is, however, a problem: having shrunk several inches and lost much of her upper-arm strength, she can no longer manage petrol pumps.
Lifting them is beyond her bicep power and she worries about tripping over the hose. Forecourts being windy, she also fears she could be blown off her feet, for she nowadays weighs less than a bag of coal.
A few years ago, none of this would have been a problem. A petrol-pump attendant would have supervised the filling of her tank and would have taken her payment while she remained in her driving seat. The attendant might have given her windscreen a clean and checked her tyres for air pressure.
The petrol would have cost a few bob more than at a self-service place, but Ma would have paid happily for the help.
Today’s filling stations are coldly efficient. You can often pay automatically at the pump. Modern pumps work fast. They do not leave much taint on your hands. It is all rather impressive in a way, but the process lacks humanity.
In my boyhood in Cirencester, Gloucestershire, there was a petrol station 100 yards from our house at the bottom of Somerford Road. It was owned by the Joneses. Mrs Jones manned (if that is the verb) the pumps and she was a delightful presence, with a head of blonde curls and a broad smile.
While my brother and I bounced around in the back of whichever jalopy my mother was driving – she piloted a succession of bangers bought by my father, who wrongly fancied he had a nose for second-hand bargains – Mrs Jones would gossip cheerfully to Ma and give us boys hearty winks.
At the bottom of town was another garage, where the pump attendant was a short, rotund, dainty fellow. He took a shine to me in my teenage years and would sometimes squirt an extra few pennies’ worth of petrol into my black Morris Minor (reg 140 XHW). He used to wink at me, too.
One of my wife’s dear aunts spent time on the pumps in Birmingham. She gave it up after marrying well. It was said that she had ‘risen above her station’. Older residents of Monmouth still talk of Eric Manns, whose father, George Manns, established Manns Garage on his return home from the Great War.
Eric was a raffish figure. When filling customers’ tanks, he would lean nonchalantly against the side of the car with a lit cigar dangling from his mouth.
His son Noel, still in the Monmouth area, loyally insists there was no danger. Manns Garage never did go up in a mushroom-cloud explosion – so perhaps Noel is right. You still find petrol-pump attendants in the United States. They are often youngsters on holiday jobs, learning to deal with the public. The expectation is that you give them a dollar tip.
American weather being more severe than ours, it can be a relief to have an attendant do the honours rather than having to step outside into the furnace heat of a Kentucky day or the icy cold of an Illinois winter.
Pump attendants are less common now in Europe, but Spain was good for them in the Franco years. Walnut-brown señors with bandy legs would emerge from the shadows wearing oily overalls and caps saying ‘CEPSA’ or ‘FINA’.
There was a garage we knew outside San Pedro de Alcántara in the 1960s that
had a tapas bar. My father would have a small saucer of boquerones and a carajillo (coffee with brandy) while our Vauxhall Victor super-estate (reg HDD 445D) was filled and given a shine.
The National Franchised Dealers Association, representing British filling stations, estimates that there are about 300 petrol-pump attendants still hard at it. An app called Fuel Service helps disabled drivers to locate garages that will offer help at the pumps.
One survivor is Ivor Rogers, proprietor of the Forge garage at Llantrisant, near Usk. His greatgrandfather started a blacksmith’s business on the site in 1895, and his grandfather moved into petrol sales during the Second World War.
Mr Rogers himself has been pumping petrol since he was a nipper of 10. He loves his work, and his customers appear to love him right back.
‘Some of them come for a kiss and a cuddle,’ laughs the irrepressible Ivor.
Given that he has been serving motorists for 70 years and that the first car is generally said to have been the Benz Patent-Motorwagen, which appeared 140 years ago in 1885, Ivor Rogers has been working at his Llantrisant petrol pump for precisely half the history of the motor car.
Let’s blow the horn for Ivor.
Quentin Letts, author of Nunc!, is the Daily Mail’s parliamentary sketch writer
Gas by Edward Hopper, 1940
Mary Killen’s Beauty Tips
Bottom marks for botox
No one likes talking to a frozen face
Just as I was becoming an adolescent and due to start worrying about my appearance, I had a stroke of luck.
My best friend Ruth’s father became manager of the Bank of Ireland. So he moved into the living quarters above the fine art-deco building in the centre of my provincial Northern Irish town.
This meant that, each day, when school ended, Ruth and I could swarm quickly back to her house and take up our position on the window seat of our eyrie in the centre of the town’s main street.
Humans never look up. And so no one realised we two were staring down from our very informative vantage point.
It was the custom at our grammar school for most pupils to head straight to the main street at the end of school each day. No one had any money to spend; the purpose was just to walk up and down the street, in a sort of passeggiata, to score social credits and debits from contemporaries: ‘He nodded at me!’ or ‘She cut me dead.’
It was a bit like people courting Instagram likes today – they did it just for reassurance, or to confirm paranoia.
Ruth and I could observe the most seemingly swaggering and confidence-filled schoolchildren regarding themselves anxiously in shop windows before taking on haughty expressions as they strode on. It was an eye-opener.
We were delighted to see the most attractive girl in the sixth form constantly ducking into doorways and pulling faces into a compact mirror, pausing before daring to resume the passeggiata
There was one boy who was above all that – Ivan. He was such a corker – later an Irish pop star – that he showed no interest at all in his appearance as he moved purposefully along the street.
The old ladies of the town would shudder when his name was mentioned. ‘That poor fellow Ivan,’ they would lament. ‘Those looks will turn his head.’
They had a point. Ivan didn’t fancy himself but had fanciability thrust upon him – and later did become slightly conceited.
Our weeks at the window taught us one thing for certain – no one gives a damn about what anyone else looks like. What matters to them is whether others appear to admire their looks.
Even in grown-up circles today, many of us have not got the message that no one cares how we look – as long as it’s not downright off-putting. And so we embark on terrible self-sabotaging beauty treatments.
Botched botox: Sophie Habboo
I am all for colouring your hair. We all start to go grey at around 40, and coloured hair – except if you are Christine Lagarde – is simply nicer.
Teeth need to be kept in good condition – no bucking or wedged food pellets.
Blepharoplasty is fine if your eyelids have started to droop so much you can’t actually see out of your eyes.
And if you simply can’t stop overeating because junk food has disrupted your leptin function, then by all means go on the weightloss jabs. I am not on them myself because they seem too good to be true.
Breast enhancement is
all very well for the correction of ‘banana bosoms’. But you don’t want them standing out like two coconuts. One man told me he felt ‘pre-coital tristesse’ when viewing an artificial naked pair.
Steer a hugely wide berth around botox.
One girl who had it in her jaw, to stop herself grinding her teeth down to stumps, found that her smile was frozen.
‘When my mouth was closed, it looked normal,’ says Made in Chelsea ‘star’ Sophie Habboo. ‘But everyone else wondered what was going on with my smile – it lasted six months.’
Botox is often injected by barely trained therapists, leaving patients with lopsided smiles and droopy eyelids. No one enjoys a conversation with someone whose responses they cannot ‘read’.
Please don’t go for hardcore facial cleansing, where the therapist leaves you with ‘colander face’ after brutally extracting whiteheads and blackheads. These can instead be treated with clay masks and salicylic acid toners, which leave no puncture marks.
But the young – starting in their early twenties – cannot be stopped. They are all pumping themselves full of botox and fillers (often made of salmon sperm).
I’ve just watched an American plastic surgeon on a TED Talk, lamenting this terrible trend – even though he’s making money from it. His lecture ended with a valid philosophical point:
‘If everyone looks identical to each other, people are going to have to start working on their personalities again – trying to be kinder, more interesting, more empathetic, as this will be the only way to differentiate themselves.’
As Henry James said, ‘Three things in human life are important: the first is to be kind; the second is to be kind; and the third is to be kind.’
Mary Killen’s Oldie Beauty Day is on 25th September. See page 26 for details
I’ve seen plenty of film clips of sheepshearing. But – OMG – have you ever seen it in the flesh?
I recently went with a friend at 6.30pm to watch the last hour of the day’s shearing. The three young shearers were on the front of a raised platform in a field. The penned sheep were herded up a ramp onto the back of the platform and, one by one, through gaps in a wooden wall to the front.
One of the lads would grab the sheep by the fleece and yank it through the gap. Two or three minutes later, the shorn sheep was shoved back through the gap and down another ramp gap into the field.
The whole thing was a pleasure to watch: a timeless bucolic scene of fit young men, stripped to the waist, doing something as old as time on a lovely day, with the lush fields and hills of Northamptonshire as background. The only modern innovation was the electric shearing kit, with the big shavers powered by a generator.
What skill! With one movement, they’d pull the sheep onto its back, straddle it, lock its head or a front leg between their legs and, with rhythmic, smooth strokes, shave off the fleece without a single nick.
The animals hardly moved. I guess
Prue’s News
Shear magic
they couldn’t, but they were calm and didn’t struggle.
That was until the shearers got to the enormous rams, or tups – especially the Charolais, a breed famous for its intractable ways. Sometimes it took two men to hold one down.
I was worried for the tups’ equipment, but the shearer would gently shield the ram’s scrotum with one hand as he shaved each side of it. I met the mum of one of the shearers the next day and she said her lad had been showing off his multiple bruises at breakfast.
The fleeces were dropped into huge sacks fixed to the side of the platform.
Full sacks were removed by one of the shearers’ wives, a nurse by profession, taking time off to help. She’d close the sack and lug it to the pile, to await removal to the Wool Marketing Board’s collection point.
There was much enjoyment and camaraderie. One of the shearers is not even a farmer; he’s a policeman. One is a neighbouring farmer, and another just enjoys shearing.
It’s relentless, hot and thirsty work. The farmer’s wife, my friend, had fed them lunch. She was worried about her 81-year-old husband, not long out of hospital, doing a 12-hour day herding sheep from pen to pen. Farming is tougher than even Jeremy Clarkson makes it look.
Sadly, fleece cost more to shear than they sell for. Those 550 sheep were sheared because otherwise they’d get flystrike (maggots round the bum) or die of heat in the summer.
Prue Leith presents
The Great British Bake Off
Literary Lunch
Fleeced: a shearer at work
Town Mouse
The Socrates Guide to a Happy Death
tom hodgkinson
It was a joyful death. The memorial service, held at St James’s Church, Piccadilly, was for Charles Handy, business expert and philosopher, who died last year at 92.
St James’s Piccadilly is one of my favourite London churches, built by Christopher Wren in 1684. It’s by Jermyn Street and Fortnum & Mason, haunts of Burlington Berties and London flâneurs Just a single step from the commercial hubbub and you find yourself in a calm and beautiful place.
The church is friendly and progressive, with a programme of art shows and talks. There’s a groovy café and a garden stocked with trees and benches – just the place to eat your sandwich at lunchtime.
William Blake was baptised there in 1757, in a marble font designed by Grinling Gibbons, who also made the oak sculpture of foliage on the reredos. The
church is proud of its association with anti-slavery campaigner Ottobah Cugoano, baptised there in 1773. The acoustics are fabulous.
Charles Handy was an author and so-called ‘management guru’, who wrote bestselling books such as The Empty Raincoat and The Second Curve. He was a frequent contributor to Radio 4’s Thought for the Day, and was in demand as a speaker all over the world for his gentle wisdom.
I first met Handy in 1994 when I went to interview him, and over the following three decades we become good mates. While he was known as an expert on the workplace, one of his messages was that we should cultivate the non-work aspects of life.
He loved Italy for its embrace of good living, and organised his life in such a way that he gave himself three
months each year at his house in Tuscany doing nothing.
In 2018, he suffered a terrible tragedy: his wife and business partner Elizabeth was killed in a car crash. Handy, who had been driving, suffered a stroke soon afterwards, leaving his left side more or less paralysed. He reacted to Liz’s death with exemplary stoicism, remaining cheerful and free of self-pity.
I went to visit him a few months before he died, at his first-floor flat in Putney. He was sitting in the window, looking out on to the common, reading Shelley. He greeted us with his usual smile and twinkly eyes.
Though he could not hold a pen, he continued writing until his very last few weeks, by dictating short pieces to a carer. These nuggets of wisdom have been collected into a lovely new book called The View from Ninety, which I recommend to all oldies.
Handy was fantastically stoic about his impending death. When I went to visit him, I felt like one of Socrates’s friends who visited the philosopher when he was in an Athenian jail in 399 BC, ready to be executed. It’s the day of his death. They sob and weep while Socrates, 70, rabbits away cheerfully about the afterlife. He tells his friends that he’s been writing poetry. And then goes on to say:
‘It seems to me to be natural that a man who has really devoted his life to philosophy should be cheerful in the face of death.’
Death is simply the release of the soul from the body, Socrates argues. And it’s the body, with its ceaseless demands, that takes time away from philosophy. Therefore philosophers are really looking forward to being free of the body, ie dying.
In similar fashion, Handy told me he was not scared of death. ‘Either it’s an eternal sleep or we go to a better place, and either is fine by me,’ he said, smiling.
I made up my mind to start thinking about death and dying immediately.
Towards the end of his life, Socrates took up dancing lessons. In this joyful spirit, at Handy’s memorial service we sang ‘Lord of the Dance’. I’d forgotten what a lovely tune it is and what an excellent sentiment the hymn, written in 1963, conveys:
‘They buried my body and they thought I’d gone, But I am the Dance and I still go on.’
The memorial programme concluded with some wise words from Handy:
‘Yes, I’m sorry, you too will die but you will live on processed into the memory of things by the people who knew and loved you.’
Country Mouse
My name is Giles and I’m a YouTube addict
giles wood
When our cheery postman caught me slipping out to the car and asked the simple question, ‘How are you, Giles?’, I struggled to think of a simple answer.
Feverish was the word that sprang to mind when I tried to analyse my early morning state of being. My nocturnal activities are starting negatively to affect my outlook on life.
At least I am not a so-called parasomniac – one of those unfortunates who order random goods from eBay while asleep. But I admit to having inherited from my father a tendency to watch television into the small hours, as well as an addictive personality.
YouTube is my latest nocturnal addiction. As the head of the household, I operate on a need-to-know basis. With a decision needing to be made about a summer vacation, I am in a state of hypervigilance regarding which apocalyptic European heat-dome destination to avoid.
There is no precedent for the information overload this cottager is experiencing. Two hundred years ago, the agricultural workers here would seize, if they could read, on any printed matter they came across – in the form of scraps of newspaper used to wrap cheese or lardy cakes.
The whole village would reflect upon, discuss and share what small, often out-of-date nuggets they had gleaned from the outside world. Today, we suffer from a constantly pulsating tide of non-stop breaking news.
As I scroll through possible holiday destinations on YouTube, I fear Putin is right about our degraded culture in the UK. What was once described as the study of atmospheric phenomena, which would fill many an agreeable hour of harmless record-keeping for retired generals checking rain gauges,
is now lumped under the heading ‘Weather porn’.
The algorithms fed me golf-ball-sized hailstorms denting cars in Micheldorf, Austria, and sending a brass band pell-mell into a giant puddle. I watched flimsy panels of newly-built gymnasium walls being ripped off by violent gusts like a pack of cards, and Greek islands on fire.
But it was a polar vortex heading towards Chile that lodged in my cerebellum. It was regurgitated in the psychic dustbin of my waking dreams in a vision of my very promising burgeoning winter squashes being ‘frosted’ in July.
I got straight onto our landline to a friend in Balham to see whether his bonsai trees had been affected.
‘For God’s sake!’ he yelled. ‘Stop watching YouTube and start drinking decaffeinated coffee. You won’t regret it.’
At a family wedding the other day, kindly nephews and nieces patiently pointed out the error of my ways. They explained that their generation and, indeed most internet-users, have developed a ‘filter’ regarding the internet.
As a late comer to YouTube, I do not yet detect any budding filtration mechanism. I just take what the algorithm spews up.
My passive acceptance of the diet served dates back to my time as a sickly asthmatic child in bed, leafing through my hardback 12-volume children’s encyclopaedia. I can blame my grasshopper mind on these formative years of darkened rooms, honey-andlemon beverages and enforced detention, long before the technical fix of Ventolin saved the day.
But why am I looking abroad for climate chaos when we now have it in our own country? The Arab nations so love our English rain that they often
congregate in London parks in great numbers soaking under the dripping green boughs. Not this year, though – the greensward in Kensington already resembles khaki, drought-stricken landing strips in safari country.
I turn to Geoffrey Grigson’s The English Year, a daily weather record, to compare today’s weather with that of yesteryear as viewed through the eyes of the most discerning writers – Hardy, Ruskin and Dorothy Wordsworth, to name but a few.
It doesn’t take me long to spot an unintentionally comic posting by Gilbert White in 1785 that conjured visions of Eric Idle sniggering, ‘Say no more!’ ‘Swifts copulate in the air, as they flie.’
But, it has to be said, the weather of yesteryear was more predictable than it is today.
As an act of kindness, my wife brings me coffee in bed each morning, along with the tabloid. It’s the usual doublespeak. On one page, ‘A heatwave hat trick looms’. On the next, ‘Parts of the UK to be battered by heavy rain, lightning and hail’.
In my feverish morning state, I confuse a number of auditory phenomena with distant rolls of thunder. The booms of big guns on Salisbury Plain are the usual suspects. So is the noise of next-door neighbours noisily wheeling their wheelie bins across cement paths.
Here in Wiltshire, we seem to have missed what there was of the summer rain. So when I hear the postman outside warning my affable neighbour, ‘They say there’s rain on the way,’ I realise I am the only villager who welcomes the news.
I have frittered away so many flowerpot man-hours with a watering can that my very waking dreams now consist of heavy rain and hail. I think, bring it on.
Postcards from the Edge
Mother Superior’s supreme advice
A wise nun gave Mary Kenny the best ever tip – always rise above slights and insults
As we convent-school girls faced our summer exeat, Mother Margaret Mary assembled us for a purposeful talk. Would this be a dark warning against the devil’s snares or the ‘occasions of sin’ that might tempt nubile teenagers?
‘Girls,’ the nun began, ‘when you start out on your working lives, my abiding advice is this: don’t be a touchy person.
‘Don’t look for slights and insults from others. Don’t take offence too quickly, or be oversensitive about trivialities. If people are unpleasant, just laugh it off! Don’t take someone’s bad mood or bad manners to heart. You will be much happier if you have a balanced attitude to tiffs and differences. Be resilient, and show your mettle by your character.’
Would such counsel pass muster today, when ‘injury to feelings’ can be a profitable source of litigation? When any ‘protected characteristic’, from gender to emotional fragility, can be grounds for ‘hurt or distress’ brought to an employment tribunal?
thoughts about the compo I might have pursued if hurt feelings had been recognised in our time.
The Central Bank of Ireland has issued a silver €15 commemorative coin to honour George Bernard Shaw, awarded the Nobel Prize for literature a century ago, in 1925.
GBS, born in 1856, was a Dublin Protestant who became an atheist, vegetarian and anti-vaxxer –opposing vaccinations long before the current vogue. He was a mixture of the altruistic, the sensible, the naïve and the idiotic. He was an admirable campaigner for public toilets, in an age when the subject was considered indelicate.
But he was also a supporter of the odious theory of eugenics, which considered some people – the shortsighted – unfit to breed. He avoided breeding himself by having an unconsummated – yet happy – marriage to his wife, Charlotte.
Embarking on a bedroom decluttering, I noted that I was in possession of more than 80 lipsticks, which is surely excessive.
Yet a lipstick is a lovely cosmetic, and, according to Leonard Lauder (19332025), the recently deceased beauty mogul, the carmine stick plays a key role in understanding economics. When women can’t afford big luxuries, they console themselves with small ones –such as another new lipstick.
He also enhanced his lipstick sales by changing the rounded tip to a more convenient slanted shape. By such innovative thinking, Mr Lauder became a great art collector and philanthropist.
I once interviewed his mother, Estée Lauder, who founded the business. She seemed friendly and practical, and a proud Jewish mother of her son Leonard.
I happened to be in New York in 1970. So I telephoned her office, explaining that I was a young journalist from Dublin and asking if could I have an interview with Madam Lauder.
‘Sure,’ came the response. It was duly arranged without fuss, no security checks and no PR supervision.
Rather than laughing off unpleasantness, would it be shrewder to suggest suing for compensation when someone’s offended?
A pinnacle was reached this summer when a woman executive claimed that being included in the collective term ‘lads’ constituted ‘sex harassment’, and implied ‘unwanted conduct’ and ‘casual use of genderspecific language’.
The tribunal judge agreed that, under the 2010 Equality Act, any woman called a ‘lad’ could feel unacceptably patronised and insulted.
Was our generation wrong to try keeping a calm exterior if banter went too far, ignoring perceived insults?
I’m torn between Mother Margaret Mary’s common sense – and rueful
Despite being ‘anti-sentimentality’, he had a sense of family loyalty. He gave a fine theatre to the Irish town of Carlow, because his mother hailed from that county, and it has remained funded by GBS’s legacy ever since.
But he was completely taken in by the Soviet Union, calling it ‘a land of hope’, and described Stalin as ‘a Georgian gentleman’.
Ireland has honoured GBS with several awards, and the small Irish navy has named one of its principal patrol vessels the George Bernard Shaw. Ironically, it may be deployed to fend off prowling Russian ships around the Atlantic shores.
The €15 (£12.78) commemorative coin, designed by Antonella Napolione, costs €65 (£55.40) to buy. Socialist GBS always did say capitalism was a swizz!
My strongest memory is of the astonishing openness – and trust – of American society at that time.
We call them ‘traffickers’, or ‘peoplesmugglers’ – the operators who ferry those small, illegal dinghies almost daily to Dover beach. The French call them passeurs
Previously, the word passeur was associated with mountain guides who brought Allied airmen, and others fleeing the Nazis, over the Pyrenees from occupied France to Spain. The Basque Florentino Goikoetxea, who guided more than 200 Allied airmen to safety, was a famous passeur
‘Trafficker’ is a pejorative term, while a passeur was a helpful guide. Such are the nuances of language.
Small World
Accident & Emergency & Sadness
Father’s in Casualty – and Mother’s lost without him
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…
Last Friday, everything changed.
As I wrote in my diary, ‘Ants have invaded our kitchen. Father has been rushed to hospital.’
Mother put it differently: ‘Typical Clarke luck. One pest goes out the front door; 500 more come in the back.’
My father has resisted all efforts to see a doctor, despite a series of reoccurring symptoms, over the last 18 months.
We couldn’t be more dissimilar. I have observed him out of my bedroom window, stripping, sanding, staining the shed, in significant pain.
Meanwhile, I casually flick through my emails to see whether NHS Digital have responded to my suggestion: add ‘the sniffles’ to their A-Z of health problems.
But then Father started hurling brown sick into buckets – and still wouldn’t seek medical advice.
Off to casualty we went.
Some terrestrial TV channels have been overdoing the documentaries on how apocalyptic A&E departments in the north are.
So, on a warm Friday night, I thought Father and I were going to be entering a forbidden zone – full of men maimed by
low-level barbecue-party injuries; football casuals with self-propelled flares up their arses; and drunk divas with chunks of hair missing, stomping round the perimeter of the ward, determined to ‘lay one on Kylie if she dares show her face’.
In fact, the most unusual cast members in A&E were Father and I – and that was because people were appalled and amused by my purple vomit bucket. I am nothing if not prepared.
We sat between two of life’s real casualties: a giant of a man who had cut his foot open by stepping on a glass clown ornament; and a mole-like bloke who had consumed his teatime soup so quickly he feared it had brought on a heart attack.
We were beckoned into the triage nurses’ room. As Father explained his general symptoms to the head nurse, the secondary nurse and I hovered in the background.
I broke the awkward silence by asking, in an accidentally sinister whisper, ‘Would you like to see some of my father’s vomit?’
She declined and pushed the purple bucket back towards me. She pointed to the door, saying, ‘There’s a toilet next door – just flush it down there.’
By the time I got back, the nurses looked solemn. Father had been fasttracked to a doctor.
This doctor was far more my thing. He welcomed Father, me and my bucket into his Dr Lecter-style cell of a consulting room. ‘Ahh, you have sample of this famous brown vomit! Excellent!’ he said.
The more I over-explained Father’s state of health, the less he believed me. He ordered me to sit near the door.
He examined Father to discover what the surgical team are now describing as Britain’s largest hernia. Father was admitted and put on an emergencyoperation list.
I sauntered home to explain to Mother that tonight she would have to sleep in her bra as the gent who normally unhooked it was unavailable.
I reminded her that a long time ago, aware that moments of extended infirmity would come, we agreed that any household duty I would perform in lieu of Father in his absence would be entirely kitchen-related or electrical. Nothing relating to bathrooms or bedrooms would be entered into.
‘It’s no wonder the kitchen’s a wildlife park for insects, with you in charge,’ she barked.
Sensing a modicum of concern for Father in her offhanded sigh, I reassured her, ‘First thing tomorrow, I’ll call.’
‘The pest-control man?’ she said. ‘The hospital? Or a bra-removing service?’
Oldie Man of Letters
Women are much nicer than men
So why do we snigger when ladies live together?
a n wilson
On one of those blazing days a few weeks ago, we went to Smallhythe Place in Kent, the home of the great Victorian actress Ellen Terry (1847-1928).
She was born into a theatrical family – a bit like Vincent Crummles and his daughter the Infant Phenomenon – and she first trod the boards as Puck in 1856. Not bad going – she was still acting on the stage seven decades later.
Smallhythe was a farmhouse when she and the great impresario Sir Henry Irving (‘We were once terribly in love’) found it in the 1890s. It had been a boat-building shed in the reign of Henry V, in the days when Smallhythe was still coastal, and it would have looked out to sea.
shrine, since Terry’s daughter Edith, also an actress, loved her own sex, and eventually lived here, in a ménage with her mother and two other ladies.
By that date, such women wore eyeglasses, smoked cigarettes through holders and sported men’s names and mannish clothes.
Now, as you stand in the upstairs room, surrounded by her costumes for legendary performances as Lady Macbeth, you gaze across green meadows and nodding elms. The garden is wonderfully planted, with borders of which Miss Jekyll would have been proud.
The National Trust has its critics, but Smallhythe is unwrecked. Its floors, bricky downstairs and oak upstairs, are as uneven and olde-time as they would have been in the days of her hero Shakespeare. The barn in the garden was designed and watched over by her daughter, Edith Craig. Her nephew John Gielgud was the patron. The place is a shrine to the great traditions of the theatre. Terry and Irving were not only superb actors. They also transformed the provincial awareness of Shakespeare by taking his plays on tours of the theatres being opened (usually by industrialist philanthropists) in the gritty Midland and Northern towns – such as the Theatre Royal Hanley (Stoke), where my great-grandparents could see Irving and Terry perform.
Smallhythe is also a bit of a queer
The notorious Labouchere Amendment (1885) made ‘gross indecency’ between men illegal, and it was this that would lead to the arrest of Irving and Terry’s protégé Oscar Wilde. Before this amendment to criminal law, lawyers and police would have to prove the crime of sodomy, which – obviously – is much more difficult to establish.
Ménage à quatre: Ellen Terry
The ‘urban myth’ is that Queen Victoria did not include women in the act because she did not believe that ‘lesbianism’ could exist, but this is rubbish. The Queen might have been an odd person, but she was emotionally intelligent, and she well knew that a number of her own ladies-in-waiting, maids of honour etc were in relationships with one another.
She knew that Mary Ponsonby, married to her Private Secretary, Henry Ponsonby, had emotional fondnesses and passions. Still, Ponsonby did not want to go the whole way with some of the women who fell in love with her – such as Ethel Smyth, the composer who conducted her rousing ‘March of the Women’ through the bars of Holloway Prison to the crowds outside. She used her toothbrush as a baton. She was in jug as a suffragette.
Visitors to Smallhythe have speculated whether Ellen Terry was a lesbian. I think this question misses some rather obvious points.
She had a series of relationships with men. She had been married aged 16 to
the painter G F Watts when he was 46 (marriage annulled owing to nonconsummation), loved and probably slept with Irving, and then had a marriage, and children, with the architect E W Godwin.
All egotists, all bullies. And, surely, like many women at a certain point of life, she felt that she would quite like to please herself and be among those who understood her – namely women. Her third marriage, to a much younger male American actor, didn’t last long.
Kingsley Amis, sometimes dubbed a misogynist, wrote that women are just much nicer than men, and this tends to be true. The sexes do actually like being apart from each other quite a lot of the time. And, if you belonged to Terry’s generation, there was no chance, for a woman married to a bloke, of leading an independent existence, even if you were a famous actress.
Some people find this disturbing. It is surely for this reason that so many women – as well as men – sneer at the women who are able to do without men.
Hence smutty jokes about nuns, or the mockery of ‘bluestockings’ – ‘Miss Buss and Miss Beale/Cupid’s darts do not feel’. To be a woman without dependency on men, or living independently of them, is a subversive act. Nearly all civilisations and religions have depended on women’s being subservient; a household such as Smallhythe is as revolutionary as anything in The Communist Manifesto. Those rudesbies in our day who label old-fashioned feminists as TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) are fantasists, if they honestly believe that having a surgical ‘op’ can make a chap into a woman. They are also misogynists.
Misogynists used simply to exclude women from good jobs or the more boring clubs. New misogynists take the fight into the enemy camp and try to colonise the feminine ‘other’. They will never convince, however loud they shout.
I was recently asked by a friend to proof-read something she had written.
‘I know how proud you are you can do it’ was her slightly dismissive, and not entirely accurate, way of asking.
It is true that my first job after university was as a proof-reader and copy editor. And so I did develop an eye for the work, though I would hardly claim it to be my greatest achievement.
In any event, halfway into the piece I pointed out a badly punctuated sentence; there was a comma in place of a semicolon. My friend does not always take criticism well.
‘I know perfectly well how to use a semicolon, but I think they are pretentious,’ she announced, determinedly, leaving the erroneous comma in its place.
No sooner had the ink dried on her misplaced comma than Babbel, a language software company, released research on the use of the semicolon. It has decreased in use by 50 per cent in the last 20 years. And 54 per cent of students do not know how to use one.
Now I do have skin in this game, both as a writer and as a teacher. I must also admit that I was not entirely confident with the semicolon myself.
It was not until I was into my thirties, a journalist, a published writer of fiction and non-fiction, a trained teacher and with a degree from a fine university that I was 100 per cent sure of what
School Days
Semicolons are a joy; a magician’s wand
sophia waugh
I was doing with that pesky piece of punctuation.
Now, however, I love it. It’s not beautiful, but my word it is useful. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it is the most nuanced piece of punctuation to hand, giving as it does sweetly gentle hints of links and connections.
It is also loved by examiners. You might be amazed at how many students turn in extended pieces of writing with no more punctuation than full stops and commas.
Some children will argue the toss, saying there is no point to punctuation. But I can promise them that the semicolon is more than a chunk of extra marks in the exam; it is a magician’s wand that will set them apart from the more earthbound writers.
I told them how I once taught a very dyslexic student, focusing on what the rubric calls ‘sophisticated’ punctuation because I knew her spelling would hold her grade right down.
In the end, she managed to pass her English Language, and I was sure it was all because she had managed to use semicolons.
Vaguely taking in the words ‘punctuation’ and ‘extra marks’, the unconvinced students then vomit exclamation marks over their pages! They do! Oh, how they love an exclamation mark! And how I hate it! Doesn’t reading a list of exclamation marks actually hurt your brain? It does mine!
Step one to curing that habit is to perform an exaggerated Dickensian reading of their work, which provokes first laughter and then shame. But not always a decrease of the dreaded ‘!’.
I was comforted by the outcry of support for the semicolon, a battle call to which I am proud to add my voice.
The Guardian went so far as to run an online semicolon
quiz (100 per cent, since you’re asking), to which I shall subject my pupils on my return.
The semicolon has been around since its invention by an Italian printer, Aldus Manutius, in 1494.
How can anything that has been in consistent use, and of consistent usefulness, for so many centuries, be labelled ‘pretentious’?
To use the colon correctly: long live the semicolon!
Tour of Oxford colleges
with Harry Mount Monday 22nd September 2025
Stroll among the dreaming spires with Harry Mount, Oldie Editor and architectural historian. Visit some of the loveliest colleges, from Balliol to Christ Church and All Souls. Lunch in the 15th-century hall of Magdalen, alma mater of Oscar Wilde, with a tour of its chapel and deer park. End the day at the Lamb and Flag, where the Inklings – including C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien –discussed their great works.
11am Meet at the main porters’ lodge of Balliol College on Broad Street
11am to 12pm Tours of Balliol College and New College
12.15pm Lunch in Hall and tour of Magdalen College
2.15pm to 4pm Tours of All Souls College and Christ Church
4.15pm Drinks at the Lamb and Flag, home of the Inklings
HOW TO BOOK: £195 per person – inc VAT, college entrances, wine with lunch (excluding pub drinks). Book with Katherine by emailing reservations@theoldie.co.uk. Or call 01225 427311
I Once Met Lemmy from Motörhead
In the mid-1980s, Motörhead were close to the peak of their popularity, riding high on the back of their early 1980s hit single ‘Ace of Spaces’.
Motörhead, however, were never about hit singles: they were about raucous gigs, cussing and snarling and living life in top gear. To a timid student like me, at Reading University at the time, dressed in my M&S jeans and V-neck jumper bought by my mother, such a rock-and-roll attitude was alien.
The university’s students’ union was the place for all flavours of students to hang out – an eclectic mix of rockers, Goths, Sloanes, bookish types and out-and-out nerds. And this is where Motörhead were rehearsing for their forthcoming evening gig in front of several hundred boozed-up students.
Passing by the closed double doors of the events hall, I heard the terrible crashing of drums and the scream of electric guitars. I paused, cracked open the door and peered into the hall.
The noise suddenly stopped. The tall man standing in the centre of the distant stage stopped all movement and held my gaze for several seconds.
Dressed all in black, long hair down to
From 1966 to 1969, I was the Moscow Correspondent of the Daily Mail.
After three years of trying to decipher the inner workings of the Kremlin, the daily lives of the Soviet people, and the implications of Communist diplomacy, I was being posted to Rome.
At Sheremetyevo Airport, I bumped into the British Embassy’s chief of MI6.
‘Why don’t we travel together?’ he suggested.
After take-off, I said, ‘Let’s have a glass of champagne.’
‘Why don’t we wait until
his shoulders and with what might charitably be called a ‘lived-in’ face, the man I recognised as Lemmy (real name Ian Fraser Kilmister, 1945-2015) strolled towards me. He stopped only when he was one step away from my where I was standing by the door.
Man in black: Lemmy (aka Ian Fraser Kilmister)
Lemmy’s face was dominated by an enormous moustache, which looked like an upside-down hairy horseshoe, and large sideburns, which I had no hope of ever emulating.
Was this my chance to secure another famous autograph, to go alongside that of the footballer Frank Worthington in my childhood scrapbook?
‘IF YOU DON’T F****** F*** OFF RIGHT NOW, I WILL KICK YOUR F****** FACE IN!’, he screamed into my face.
I cracked a nervous smile, muttered an apology, and retreated as fast as a speeding bullet.
Joel Hancock
Moscow hack who came in from the cold
we are out of Soviet airspace?’ he replied.
It struck me as a peculiarly ominous response. Once we were beyond Soviet territory, he said, ‘Now let’s have that champagne.’
The next day, in London, I lunched with the Mail’s editor. He asked how long I had been in Moscow. I told him three years.
’You must be glad to be out,’ he said.
I was.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I can now tell you we are very glad to get you out.’
He explained that, a month earlier, he had received a tip from a former MI6 agent, now a director of Associated Newspapers, that I was to be arrested, and put on show trial.
The reason: the British held a married Soviet couple, Peter and Helen Kroger, on spy charges, and the KGB, the Soviet spy agency, wanted to free them through a prisoner swap.
But the Soviets held only one British prisoner, Gerald Brooke, a businessman. I was to make up the balance.
I have often wondered what the Soviets would have used to press espionage charges.
My assumption: I had travelled – with Kremlin permission – from Khabarovsk to Nakhodka, on the Trans-Siberian Railway, and written a splash story on the Soviet military build-up along the Sino-Soviet border. It was standard
journalism, but the Soviets could have presented it differently.
In the end, the Russians got their deal: the Krogers were exchanged for Gerald Brooke. And I transferred, without incident, to Rome. But it shows how journalists are always hostage to fate in hostile countries. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, 361 journalists were imprisoned last year. And there, but for the grace of God…
Gilbert Lewthwaite, Columbia, Maryland, USA, who receives £50
Readers are invited to send in their own 400-word submissions about the past
sister teresa
Love among the ruins
In his magisterial account of the siege of Stalingrad, Antony Beevor, without flinching or allowing his reader to shy away, covers all the horrors of war: agony, destruction, despair, squalor and fear, to name but a few.
But the passage which has stuck most firmly in my mind has nothing to do with cruelty and brutality.
It deals with a soldier’s reaction, in the middle of all the foul chaos, when he sees a white cup decorated with a red flower. It reminds him, however briefly, that normality exists and is, ultimately, a desirable possibility.
It is a big mistake to denigrate ordinariness; without it, there is little chance of peace ever taking hold. One of the definitions in George Herbert’s sonnet ‘Prayer’ is ‘heaven in ordinary’.
That this definition should be immediately followed by ‘The milky way, the bird of Paradise’ shows that the ordinary is every bit as valuable as the
infinity of the universe or the glamour of the most beautiful of all birds.
In his poem, Herbert gives us a very good mixture: something for all tastes.
It is not, however, just a matter of taste. In another poem, ‘The Elixir’, Herbert echoes the motto of the Jesuits: ‘Ad maiorem Dei gloriam’ (for the greater glory of God):
‘Teach me my God and King, In all things Thee to see, And what I do in anything, To do it as for Thee… A servant with this clause Makes drudgery divine: Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws Makes that and th’action fine.’
Ordinariness is one of the basics of monastic life; so is housework. I am ashamed to say that little domestic science had ever come my way until the first week of my novitiate, when I had to be given sweeping lessons. Once one has
Memorial Service
mastered its rhythm, sweeping becomes unexpectedly satisfactory and the resulting gleaming floor is surprisingly pleasing: all my own work.
Drudgery is never any fun, but most work is acceptable, especially if one remembers that it gives glory to God.
Jesus himself, as a carpenter’s son, was, for at least a decade, involved in the uncomplicated and back-breaking labour of sawing wood.
Ordinary bad; extraordinary good. Much advertising is dedicated to trying to persuade us of this. Common sense should tell us otherwise. Ordinariness should never be harnessed to boredom, but rather to harmony and calm. As we get older, it is to be hoped that we become a bit more sensible, and also more sensitive.
An ability to count one’s blessings is a huge help to a happy existence. And these blessings are often to be found where one may not expect them: in the everyday.
Sir John Nott (1932-2024)
The Rev Steven Brookes, Chaplain of the Royal Hospital Chelsea, presided over the thanksgiving service for Sir John Nott, Defence Secretary during the Falklands War, at the Royal Hospital’s Wren Chapel.
Former Deputy Prime Minister Michael Heseltine, 92, gave the address. Heseltine and Nott were elected as Tory MPs on the same day in 1966, when Harold Wilson won a landslide.
the countryside, and it is here that you must search for the heart of the man.’
Lord Heseltine said, ‘John was very clear in his ambition about what he liked and wanted.
‘He wanted a military experience that associated him with his great-great-great grandfather’s involvement in the 19thcentury Afghan wars. He wanted to make money and have a political career, with the latter lasting no more than 15 years. He loved
Nott served with the 2nd Gurkha Rifles in the Malayan Emergency. After his army service, he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge.
Heseltine said, ‘John described his time at Cambridge as the three most wasted years of his life, a rather partial judgement considering he became President of the Cambridge Union.’
Nott later worked at Warburg’s and married the Slovenian Miloška Vlahović.
Heseltine said Nott ‘gatecrashed Miloška’s engagement party to another man, declaring his intention to marry her – which he subsequently did.’
Heseltine told how Nott became Trade Secretary when Thatcher won the 1979 election and gained her confidence as a
Eurosceptic. He became Defence Secretary in 1981, a year before the Falklands War.
Heseltine said, ‘John had already reached the end of his planned political career and arrangements were made to make his retirement public. He sought to resign at the same time as the Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington, but was persuaded that it was his duty to remain.’
Hymns included ‘Guide me, O thou great Redeemer’ and ‘Hills of the North, rejoice’.
The choir sang Psalm 55, ‘O for the Wings of a Dove’.
His granddaughter Saffron Swire read from his daughter Sasha Swire’s Diary of an MP’s Wife
His granddaughter Tabitha Nott read John 14.1-6, ‘Let not your heart be troubled’. His grandson William Nott read from Nott’s diary.
Collects of the Brigade of Gurkhas and the Royal Hospital Chelsea were read.
JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW
The Doctor’s Surgery
Deaf penalty of earphones
A deafness epidemic is in store for the young
dr theodore dalrymple
Will there be an epidemic of deafness in the future?
Whenever I go to a restaurant these days, with its deliberate amplification of noise to give the impression of liveliness, I think that there will be.
Not, of course, that such an epidemic will be of any consequence to me. For I shall long since have sunk into that most profound of silences, commonly known as the grave.
The prevalence of the use of earphones by people on buses and trains, or while out jogging – even just walking in the street or park – will lead to an epidemic.
Two thirds of people over the age of 70 already have significant hearing loss. That is to say, two thirds of people who reached adulthood before the modern era of solipsistic cacophony or cacophonous solipsism.
Hardness of hearing is associated statistically with isolation, loneliness and dementia. A third of people over the age of 70 feel lonely. Still, it is possible to feel lonely in midst of a crowd. And how one feels is not necessarily a guide to what others might regard as objective reality.
In my more misanthropic moments, I sometimes wonder whether a little hardness of hearing might not be, if not an advantage exactly, at least a temporary blessing. This, of course, is a foolish thought.
Loneliness and social isolation are in turn associated with poor health and increased mortality. Researchers have wondered whether improving old people’s hearing might not improve their health and wellbeing – a perfectly reasonable thing to wonder.
A trial took a few hundred old people – average age 76 – who thought they had no hearing problems, and divided them into two.
The first group were given general health advice, of the kind that we all know and love because it exposes in plain
sight our bad habits and exhorts us to change them.
The second group were tested for hearing loss. Those who had it were provided with hearing aids and informed how to use them best in different situations. The two groups were followed up for three years, and the degree of their loneliness and social isolation measured.
These days, almost any quality or human experience that you can think of has a scale of measurement – allegedly both valid and reliable. The validity of a scale is the degree to which it measures what it is supposed to measure; for example, a scale of height that really does measure height. Reliability is the degree to which two observers using a scale will arrive at the same figure. In this way, objectivity is assured.
Social isolation and loneliness allegedly have such scales: the Cohen Social Isolation Scale, which quantifies people’s connectedness to a social network, and the UCLA Loneliness Scale, measured by answers to 20 questions.
One of the problems of such scales, even if valid and reliable, is knowing the
significance – the real significance; not the merely statistical significance – of small changes in results after a treatment. A change may be discoverable to an observer but not experienced by the subject.
For example, it was found that those people with hearing loss who were provided with hearing aids and training in how to use them best had a reduced loss of social network and a smaller increase in loneliness, by comparison with those people with hearing loss who were not provided with hearing aids and training.
It is, of course, obvious that hardness of hearing is not conducive to an active social life and tends to worsen with age.
Any improvement for those given hearing aids by comparison with the experience of those without is therefore likely to increase in time. But, after three years, the difference was disappointingly small, though statistically significant.
Whether any of this was perceptible to the subjects themselves is an open question. For what it is worth, I think that in time it would become so.
'The moment the sun comes out, the tourists arrive'
The Oldie, 23–31 Great Titchfield Street, London, W1W 7PA letters@theoldie.co.uk
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Mum’s porky pie
SIR: Paul Heiney’s piece about a Fray Bentos-based dinner party (‘Nice as pie’, July issue) reminded me of a similar event given by my parents in the 1960s. My parents were academics and each year would give a party for colleagues.
The numbers were too large for guests to sit at a table and eat; instead, my mother would serve something then regarded as exotic, such as chicken à la king or goulash with rice or potatoes from huge aluminium pans. (Guests would have been horrified to know that these were usually used to soak clothes prior to washing.)
One year, the local grocer told my mother that Fray Bentos had tried going upmarket with a game pie but they had many left unsold. My mother bought a large number, and as usual brought out the meal on plates from the kitchen.
She accepted many compliments from guests on the flavour of the gravy and the flaky pastry until one guest wandered into the kitchen – and on seeing the empty tins revealed the truth.
Nigel Long, Keynsham, Bristol
‘Your son’s performance has been less than satisfactory’
Poet Laureate manqué
SIR: Good article on the pies (‘Nice as pie’, July issue), but I was sorry to see no mention of the excellent steak-and kidney-puddings, aka in the Royal Navy ‘babies’ heads’.
Re A N Wilson’s ‘Great war stories’ (June issue) about war poets, again sorry to see no mention of Charles
‘You
only want me for my body’
Causley – ‘the best Poet Laureate we never had’.
Yours faithfully, Ian Campbell, Staines, Middlesex
VE Day remembered
SIR: I must take issue with Owen Wells’s letter in the June issue. I too was a schoolboy in 1945, living with my family in London. VE Day, 8th May, was a huge celebration of the end of the war in Europe.
None of us could possibly forget that time – and that would include schoolboys and all who witnessed the many events taking place all over the country.
Yours etc.
Paul Gilbert, Alfreton, Derbyshire
Big brain scan
SIR: The Doctor’s Surgery is always worth reading. I particularly enjoyed Dr Dalrymple’s piece in the July issue. He mentioned that the inventor of the CAT scan was awarded a Nobel Prize because of its importance.
Shortly after receiving the prize, the inventor, sadly no longer with us, consulted me with troublesome headaches, worse on coughing, sneezing and straining (eg as at stool).
After the history and examination, he proudly presented me with his own brain scan, performed on the latest version of the scanner he had invented.
With it, he changed the medical world. After studying his scan, I handed it back to him, saying that it wouldn’t do –and that he’d need to go and do it again. This caused him some amusement!
On the second attempt, the foramen magnum (at the very base of the skull) was included, from where I suspected his symptoms originated.
The repeat scan confirmed this suspicion, and I was able to cure his headaches (and constipation!) with a laxative. Not a conventional treatment for headaches.
My secretary didn’t send him a bill.
Yours,
Professor D J Thomas, OBE, FRSM, Professor emeritus of clinical neuroscience, Imperial College; retired consultant neurologist, St Mary’s Hospital; Chesham, Buckinghamshire
No sex please – we’re British
SIR: Reading Catriona Olding’s excellent article on the incorrigible French chaps (‘Thrill of the chaste’, July issue), I’m reminded of a friend’s experience when he unwisely left his Swedish girlfriend alone with a French friend.
On his return, he found her in her underwear, with snaps being taken. When he protested, the reply was ‘I am French, I ’ave a camera, these things ’appen.’
Tom Cowan, Battle, East Sussex
Gender-bending
SIR: I am a little puzzled by Richard Godwin’s suggestion (Modern Life, July issue) that looksmaxxing is ‘more serious and masculine because – like the male chromosome – it has two xs’.
When I was at medical school in the 1960s, we were taught that there were two sex chromosomes, X and Y, the Y being the male one. If you are XX you are a woman, XY a man. So, if anything, looksmaxxing implies a feminine outlook. Perhaps the current debate on gender fluidity has gone to Mr Godwin’s head.
Yours in confusion, Dr Andrew Bamji, Rye, East Sussex
Blue-blooded Catholics
SIR: I was faintly amused to read (Memorial Service, July issue) that Sir Malcolm Rifkind suggested at the funeral of Michael Ancram, 13th Marquess of Lothian, that ‘his credibility in Irish matters was helped by the fact that, although an aristocrat, he was a Catholic’.
Roman Catholicism is the religion of many of the most authentically noble and aristocratic names in the Kingdom, notably, of course, that of the Earl Marshal – the Duke of Norfolk. Patrick Bennett, Pyrford, Surrey
Come, friendly bombs
SIR: I have never quite forgiven the Zeppelin commanders for failing to do a more thorough job of flattening Great Yarmouth during the Great War.
However, after reading William Cook’s excellent travel piece (July issue), I am intrigued. I may need to visit Friedrichshafen, even if the RAF proved far more efficient in their work.
Yours faithfully, Anthony Bennett, Ormesby St Margaret, Norfolk
One of our clichés is missing
SIR: When I saw Mark Palmer’s list of banned words in travel articles (‘Sun, sea and clichés’, July issue), I eagerly glanced through the list to find my own example … lo and behold, ‘bustling’ wasn’t there. All holiday towns are bustling. How could he forget that one in his top 100?
Anthony Robinson, Southwell, Nottinghamshire
And another one...
SIR: I realise now, having read Mark Palmer’s article on travel writing (‘Sun, sea and clichés’, July issue), how very difficult it must be to avoid those ‘appalling clichés’. But could I please suggest that he forgot to add to his list of ‘Banned Words in Travel Pieces’ the dreaded BEST-KEPT SECRET!
Rosemary Cleaver, Combe, Oxfordshire
Language bugbears
SIR: Please thank Gyles Brandreth for highlighting (July issue) the dreadful word ‘pre-order’ – one of my particular hates among so many. ‘Gonna’ is just as bad, along with folk who write ‘ect’ for et cetera.
Peter Hillman, Littlehampton, West Sussex
PS For Gyles: we met on the Countdown set in 1985 – I still have the pen and dictionaries! I hope Ms Dent would not allow ‘gonna’ – and if she thinks, as recently reported, that ‘mis-cheev-ious’ is now acceptable just because so many ignorant people pronounce it thus, there is little hope left!
I saw lovely Bill Haley live
SIR: The Old Un’s Notes were way off the mark when they reported (July issue) that the 1957 Bill Haley UK tour concerts saw a ‘full-scale riot going on by the end of most shows’. What rioting there was took place during the much earlier cinema showings of Blackboard Jungle, which featured the game-changing Haley song ‘Rock Around the Clock’.
The 1957 concerts induced huge teenage excitement, but no riots of any description. There was no anticipation of any riots, either. I was at the Coventry
concert matinée as an 11-year-old, which my parents had the confidence to allow me to attend alone.
My elder brothers both went to the evening show and, again, there was high enthusiasm – but there was definitely no trouble of any sort at either show.
Yours, Ron Osmond, Hinckley, Leicestershire
‘Your wallet is too congested; I’m going to relieve the pressure’
Matthew’s call of the wild
SIR: I sympathise with Matthew Norman after reading the description (July issue) of his overgrown garden, as I have a similar wilderness at the back of my house.
However, I am quite relaxed about it and merely inform nosy parkers that I am rewilding, and feel proud in playing my part in the protection of umpteen species of local flora and fauna in a world otherwise seemingly intent on destroying Mother Nature’s bountiful gifts to us.
Jack Critchlow, Torquay, Devon
Negative cash flow
SIR: I am with Liz Hodgkinson (‘A penny for the guide dogs’, June issue) in trying always to use cash, but I fear the tide is against us.
My local supplier of specialist fasteners for the workshop (warning: may contain nuts!) won’t take cash even for a 30p bolt.
The reason is simple. The banks have closed so many branches he can no longer nip out and deposit the day’s takings. He needs to waste half a day, parking charges etc, to find one where he can do so.
Not good to have too much cash on the premises all the time –although I suppose eventually thieves will be in the same boat!
Sincerely,
Keith Martin, Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire
History
Putting Britain on the map
Maps reveal our history – from the Roman invasion to the Cold War
david horspool
I recently helped my son pack up his stuff at the end of his degree in Manchester.
One prized possession that had made it through four years of student life was his map of the city and its outskirts. The city occupies the top left part of the sheet. Dead centre is Bredbury, whose greatest claim to fame is as the birthplace of Mike Yarwood.
Who – apart from the Yarwoods –would make a small Cheshire suburb the centre of attention, rather than its much more important neighbour?
The map’s title tells you more: not Manchester, Bolton, Stockport and Oldham, but МАНЧЕСТЕР, БОЛТОН, СТОКПОРТ И ОЛДЕМ.
It was, in fact, a replica of a Soviet military map; scale 1:25,000. It was created in 1975, at the height of the Cold War. It is one of four sheets, which accounts for its odd orientation, and also contains a detailed description of the target area (helpfully translated online).
There are descriptions of population density; industrial activity (this was the 1970s); the university’s radio telescope; and the observation that, as well as ‘electricity, telephone and telegraph links’, many of the ‘settlements in the Manchester region … have running water’.
Then came the chilling remark: ‘Potential underground shelters include coal mines … railway tunnels … and the basements often found in the old buildings in the city centre. Open-cast mines and adits (horizontal entrances to underground mines) could also be used as shelters, both in the city and [in] the surrounding areas.’
This was a map for invaders, not tourists. No wonder UK defence spending at the time was more than five per cent of GDP. In the ’70s, had things gone wrong we really could have been speaking Russian.
My son’s Soviet city plan is a reminder of the historical value of maps in an age
when we don’t use them very much, except for the arrows we follow across our satnavs.
Satellites guide us very efficiently to our destinations, but we miss any sense of the area we’re traversing as we go.
To follow a satnav is to feel as if you’ve been picked up in one place and set down in another, with no requirement to look out for landmarks or distinguishing features. Turn left in 100 yards, and never mind if you’re passing an ideal underground shelter.
I suspect the biographer and historian Graham Robb, whose new book of British history, The Discovery of Britain, is out later in the year, would agree. Robb, most of whose books incorporate his devotion to cycling, is addicted to maps. An earlier book about the Celts was subtitled
Discovering the Lost Map of Ancient Europe
Maps also suggest to Robb that our concept of the divisions and extent of Roman Britain is mistaken, and the shire system is even older than generally thought. He thinks it isn’t just pre-Saxon, but pre-Roman.
He knows, too, that maps can be informative even when they are, from modern observation, completely wrong. Even when their outlines look like guesswork, medieval maps give a sense of priorities, including ‘orientation’ –some of the earliest surviving maps of Britain have the east coast at the top.
Dad’s Army Map of Europe, 1944
If you’re a cyclist planning a route, you’re naturally drawn to older and currently less-well-used routes. And you’re conscious of terrain in a way that would have mattered to our ancestors but which the car-driver barely registers as he puts his foot down to crest a hill.
Robb’s new book begins with a few pages torn from a road atlas as he hastily plans a cycle route between stranded trains in Lancashire. Naturally, when they arrive, the train he and his wife aim to join is cancelled.
But, on the way, he tells us, ‘I realised that we had ridden an accidentally coherent route backward through two thousand years of British history’ –through Roman, Viking, Norman, medieval and modern interactions with the landscape.
In my books, I have found that maps can redraw your historical perspective. Writing about Richard III and pondering his well-attested connection to ‘the North’, I was surprised to find that, if you looked at a map of his movements as king, another geographical bias emerged. After the rebellion towards the beginning of his reign, Richard never went west of Leicester, until he ventured in that direction on his fatal last journey.
Later, when looking at the history of British sport, I was tickled to see that a map of Welsh coal mines can be pretty effectively superimposed on one of Welsh rugby clubs, making clear the connection between the two.
In one of his clerihews, Edmund Clerihew Bentley (1875-1956) declared:
‘Geography is about Maps, But Biography is about Chaps.’
He was only half-right. Historians can take advantage of an atlas too.
Graham Robb’s The Discovery of Britain: An Accidental History is out on 2nd October
The
I’m not a naturally funny man. I find that I can only be funny if I become someone else.
Rowan Atkinson
There’s nothing to being a butler, really; when you’re in the room, it should be even more empty.
Cyril Dickman, a butler at Buckingham Palace for 50 years, who advised Anthony Hopkins on playing a butler in The Remains of the Day (1993)
It’s not true I had nothing on. I had the radio on.
Marilyn Monroe
If you would be pungent, be brief.
Robert Southey
That’s what showbusiness is – sincere insincerity.
Benny Hill
If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh. Otherwise, they’ll kill you.
George Bernard Shaw
If my films make one more person miserable, I’ll feel I have done my job.
Woody Allen
I never make the mistake of arguing with people for whose opinions I have no respect.
Edward Gibbon
Commonplace Corner
Cunning: Blackadder (Rowan Atkinson)
The War Office kept three sets of figures – one to mislead the public, another to mislead the cabinet and the third to mislead itself.
H H Asquith, Prime Minister (1852-1928)
How come you never see a headline like ‘Psychic Wins Lottery’?
Jay Leno
If nobody said anything unless he knew what he was talking about, a ghastly hush would descend upon the earth.
A P Herbert
Most of the sex I’ve seen on the screen looks like an expression of hostility towards sex.
Myrna Loy
Latecomers
The editor of American Vogue, Anna Wintour, and I don’t have much in common. But we’re always on time – or early – for meetings and events.
The late agony aunt Claire Rayner was also
always ahead of schedule, sitting in her place before everybody else.
However hard I try, I can never be late for anything. I calculate how long it will reasonably take me to get anywhere. And then I find I have vastly overestimated the journey time – and have to hang around until the appointed time.
But if I can manage to arrive on the dot or before, why can’t everyone else? And I travel by public transport, which isn’t always reliable. I catch an earlier train than I need to – so
Whatever happens will be for the worse, and it is therefore in our interest that as little should happen as possible.
Lord Salisbury, the three-times Prime Minister (1830-1903)
A journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
John Steinbeck
Tears are the noble language of eyes, and when true love of words is destitute The eye by tears speak, while the tongue is mute.
Thomas Herrick
I did not attend his funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it.
Mark Twain
A great source of calamity lies in regret and anticipation. Therefore a person is wise who thinks of the present alone, regardless of the past or future.
Oliver Goldsmith
Ye lovers of the picturesque, if ye wish to drown your grief, Take my advice and visit the ancient town of Crieff.
William McGonagall
I like to drink to suit my location.
Tom Jones
great is my fear of keeping people waiting and arriving hot and bothered. Fashionably late? Fashionably rude, more like. Only the self-important can possibly think it’s a virtue to be late. It’s never glamorous to be hours late,
SMALL DELIGHTS
Opening a dictionary at the exact page for the word you were looking up.
DAVID GIBSON Thessaloniki, Greece
as the film star Elizabeth Taylor often was. When vain latecomers eventually arrive and put on a great show of making a grand entrance, I am not impressed. It’s always the same people who are late.
If confronted, they will tell you, laughing, that they have no sense of time, as if this were some endearing quality that you, the early one, are supposed to admire. They imply they have more important things to do than be on time.
But even they can be on time, if it suits them. Would they be late to be knighted by the King? Of course not. It’s only people they think are beneath them whom they keep waiting.
LIZ HODGKINSON
The King’s moneyman
ANDREW M BROWN
The Colonel and the King: Tom Parker, Elvis Presley and the Partnership that Rocked the World By Peter Guralnick
White Rabbit £35
Embargoed till July 23rd
Embargoed till July 23rd
Scarborough fares
MARK PALMER
To the Sea by Train: The Golden Age of Railway Travel By Andrew Martin
Profile Books £18.99
Within the first few pages of Andrew Martin’s strangely uplifting lament about the failings of a national railway
Colonel Tom Parker (1909-97) and Elvis (1935-77)
system, you realise this malaise has long been with us.
Up until 1923, there were 120 railway companies in Britain – ‘a relatively sensible number compared to 1846, when there’d been 272’.
The Railway Magazine in 1906 reported how a reader had seen, near Basingstoke, a train drawn by a London & South Western Railway engine, consisting of:
1) South Western Railway’s carriage
2) North Eastern Railway’s horsebox
3) Great Northern Railway’s carriage
4) Great Eastern Railway’s horsebox
5) Great Western Railway’s horsebox
6) Great Central Railway’s carriage
Fast forward to 2025 and it’s just as chaotic, with a ticketing system designed to make fools of us all and a timetable (‘Sorry for any inconvenience caused’) that often bears no resemblance to reality.
Even so, Martin, a railway historian with a wry wit and delightful turn of phrase, still loves trains. He especially loves them when they are heading for the coast – those, that is, that escaped the onslaught of Ernest ‘Ernie’ Marples, the Conservative Minister of Transport from 1959 to 1964, and his willing henchman Dr Richard Beeching.
‘Two transport modes killed trains to the British seaside: cars and planes. The cars killed the trains; the planes killed the seaside. And Dr Beeching assisted the car cause with unjustified enthusiasm,’ says Martin.
The section about Scarborough is fascinating. There were those who feared that connecting the seaside town to York by rail – which happened in 1846 – would be the ruin of it. In fact, Scarborough became ‘the first seaside resort in Britain and perhaps the world’.
When the Grand near Scarborough Station opened in 1867, it was reputedly the largest hotel in Europe.
After the passing of the Bank Holiday Act in 1871, two additional platforms were opened in Scarborough. One featured the longest railway bench in the world – a quarter of a mile long, accommodating 230 people. Miraculously, it’s still there.
The Grand also still exists. At one point, it was bought by Butlin’s. But where once it was the most expensive hotel in town, today it’s the cheapest.
People arriving at what used to be the handsome colonnaded station, housing the original two platforms, are now greeted by a brutalist office block and car park, with another on the site of the additional platforms decommissioned in 1985.
But at least you can still get to Scarborough by train, particularly in summer with the help of the Scarborough Spa Express, a touristy steam service from York.
The same can’t be said for the likes of Hayling Island, Padstow, Ventnor, Selsey on the West Sussex coast, Allhallows-onSea in Kent and Whitby, where Yorkshireman Martin longs to live ‘in one of the ship captain’s houses overlooking Pannett Park, with a flagpole in the garden’.
The scenic line along the coast to Whitby from the north, closed in 1958, is now a cycle track. Two others were closed following the 1964 election, leaving just one via Middlesbrough – a five-and-ahalf-hour journey from London with two changes.
Mind you, the British didn’t always like to be beside the seaside. It was more a place to go if you were sick: ‘The waters were efficacious against ailments from wind to leprosy.’
And when Queen Victoria braved the Solent off the Isle of Wight on 30th July 1847 for her first ever swim, she was 28.
‘I thought it delightful until I put my head under the water when I thought I should be stifled,’ she said.
Martin has a journalistic eye. He visits all the coastal towns he writes about, listening in to conversations, observing people’s luggage and bridging the gap between the golden age of railway travel and the current malarkey where passengers take refuge in their mobile phones and hardly ever look out of the window.
There’s a pleasant undercurrent of nostalgia in this clever book – and a sense that only those of us who took the train to the coast in the 1950s and ’60s can fully appreciate that first sighting of the salty sea on a summer’s day.
Mark Palmer was Travel Editor of the Daily Mail
Doctor knows MARY KILLEN
Nothing but
Wickedness:
The Delusions of Our Culture
By Theodore Dalrymple
Gibson Square £14.99
Where medical anecdotes are concerned, you would be hard pushed to find a more scholarly and entertaining compilation than this.
Dr Theodore Dalrymple, the psychiatrist and The Oldie’s resident
doctor, has practised in British prisons and in many a far-flung overseas territory. He is also a popular and witty writer. In his line of work, he has observed at first hand the results of conventional and alternative medical treatments, as well as witch doctoring.
Dr Dalrymple is almost excessively well-read. In these musings, he ‘riffs’ on a range of medically adjacent topics: on literary doctors (Chekhov, Conan Doyle) and on writers who were the children of doctors – including Oscar Wilde and Marcel Proust. A medical background seems to predispose a child to be observant. I’m the daughter of a GP –and I spent my youth helping in the surgery, people-watching.
Dalrymple is also well-acquainted with almost all real-life medical horror stories, involving the likes of Dr Crippen. He is especially interested in the doctors of dictators. He tells us about Dr Li Zhisui, (Chairman Mao’s doctor) and Theodor Morell (Hitler’s doctor).
Felix Kersten, Himmler’s doctor, was blessed with astoundingly effective healing hands. Using ancient techniques of Tibetan massage, he effectively gained such control over Heinrich Himmler that he undoubtedly saved many lives. So dependent was Himmler on Kersten’s pain relief that Kersten was able to dissuade him from deporting the whole population of the Netherlands to Poland in the Second World War.
Dalrymple has read, it seems, every novel written by a doctor or about a doctor. He knows every plot line in Shakespeare where physical or mental illness is involved. He is the authority on real-life wicked and misguided doctors.
Who knew that Mary Lamb – who, with her brother Charles, wrote Tales from Shakespeare – had stabbed her mother to death while suffering from ‘lunacy’? Or that Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s lack of ability to finish work was nothing to do with people from
Porlock – and more to do with his own consumption of claret.
We begin to agree with Dr Johnson that people’s health problems are very largely self-generated.
No one can live for ever. And we are not responsible for things our ancestors have bequeathed to us genetically. But, by the end of this book, I agreed with Dr John Booth’s diagnosis of the human being in general:
‘We must consider how many diseases proceed from our own laziness, intemperance, or negligence.’
Dalrymple is a baleful student of human nature. And he offers a mine of medical related material to be employed in one’s conversational repertoire.
I had no idea Dylan Thomas’s death was probably the result of misdiagnosis. Yes, he had had 18 double whiskies on the day he died. But that was nothing in contrast with what he was used to consuming. In fact, he died of pneumonia because his temperature and fever were misunderstood by the doctor he went to as a side effect of excessive drinking.
Who knew that Molière died on-stage during the production of his own play Le Malade imaginaire, which railed against doctors, fake diagnoses and iniquitous charges?
This is the volume to consult when you’re in need of a laugh, or ready to be astonished by the miracle of medicine and the gullibility of the human being. The Victorians had faith in ‘purifying pills and Baring-Gould’s Antirheumatic Pearls’.
As Dalrymple says, ‘How strange our predecessors were; how credulous to believe the things they did. Have they never heard of real remedies, such as Hopi ear candles and coffee enemas?’
Mary Killen is The Oldie’s beauty correspondent
‘Wining isn’t everythingit’s the only thing!’
Mother from Hell
CHARLES ELTON
How to Lose Your Mother: A Daughter’s Memoir
Molly Jong-Fast Picador £16.99
The kind of memoir that describes terrible abuse, monstrous parents and life’s more horrific vicissitudes has come to be known as victim porn.
Molly Jong-Fast’s wry and sad book about her nightmarish mother, Erica Jong, 83, the famous author of Fear of Flying (1973), is rather different. She never presents herself as a victim – and the porn is provided by her mother.
With many graphic descriptions of her sexual journey, Jong’s book became a cultural phenomenon, selling more than 20 million copies. While the book was regarded as a rallying cry for liberating women from conventional sexual shackles, Jong was actually rather late to the feminist party, the foundations of which Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan and others had built in the 1960s.
Their parties tended to be action groups and demonstrations rather than the celebrity-filled literary soirées of the Upper East Side, where writers discussed
The Music Room (1823), built in Chinese style by Frederick Crace, at Brighton’s Royal Pavilion. Note the clerestory window. From The Royal Pavilion, Brighton: A Regency Palace of Colour and Sensation (Yale) by Alexandra Loske
advances and movie rights more than the empowerment of women.
Despite Steinem’s renowned statement that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle, Jong seems enthralled by men: ‘You longed to be annihilated by love, to be swept off your feet, to be filled by a giant prick spouting sperm … silks and satins … and of course money’ – a statement that is less Steinem and more Barbara Cartland, albeit without the giant prick.
Writers have alter egos, and there tends to be a certain distance – an airlock – between themselves and their character. In her entirely autobiographical The Bell Jar (1963), Sylvia Plath named her heroine Esther Greenberg; the Philip Roth-like character in many of his novels is called Nathan Zuckerman. Erica Jong called herself Isadora Wing.
The problem for her daughter, Molly, was that, as her mother was so clearly Wing, the daughter in Jong’s novels was obviously her – and not very flatteringly portrayed. The millions who had read the books would know ‘something terrible about me, like how bratty I was or that I couldn’t read … or how I was fat.’ She also had to cope with their having a little too much information about her mother’s vagina.
Jong’s second novel, How to Save Your Own Life (1977) describes how
Isadora Wing is propelled to fame – and further sexual encounters – by the publication of her scandalous first novel. However, that fame ‘changed the make-up of her cells like a smoker who gets lung cancer’.
It also meant that Jong – unable to resist any kind of invitation, book tour or foreign lecture – was never around. Despite Jong’s endlessly professing her love for her daughter, ‘I spent most of my school breaks in a trailer park in Tampa with my nanny.’
Molly’s father, acrimoniously divorced from Jong, tells her, ‘We tried to get her to spend just one hour with you. The most she could do was half an hour.’
There was a constant procession of men who took up her time. She married her fourth husband when Jong-Fast was 11. The wedding was in March: ‘It was not my mother’s first engagement that year.’
But the shame of her childhood was her mother’s alcoholism. She was even famous at the occasional AA meetings she went to. She gave up going because ‘Everyone just wanted help getting an agent.’
She was often publicly smashed and ‘never went to a wedding or bar mitzvah or party during which she didn’t get drunk and grab a microphone’.
At a party she gave for Ken Follett and his wife, she ended her toast by saying, ‘Ken and I never f**ked.’ Jong-Fast, knowing that some embarrassment would be coming, had hidden in the kitchen.
Much of Jong-Fast’s memoir is taken up with how she copes with her husband’s pancreatic cancer, just as Jong is showing signs of dementia.
Jong-Fast, 46, is well aware of the irony of having to care for a mother who never took care of her. She finally makes the painful decision to put her in a care home and berates herself: ‘This is not one of those stories where the daughter nurses her parents. I am the daughter who finds people and pays them to do the daughterly work I might have done.’
Jong-Fast’s love for her mother is never in question. She dedicates her book to Jong, ‘who created me and I love more than anything’, and she describes their painful relationship in a moving and graceful way.
It is unlikely that her next book will be a novel about a writer called Polly Wing-Fust who has just written a memoir about her mother, the once famous novelist Isadora Wing.
Charles Elton is author of Cimino: The Deer Hunter, Heaven’s Gate, and the Price of a Vision
Durrell trouble
THOMAS W HODGKINSON
Larry: A New Biography of Lawrence Durrell 1912-45
By Michael Haag
Profile Books £25
Literary stature doesn’t always walk hand in hand with physical height. Martin Amis was 5ft 6in. J M Barrie was 5ft 3in.
And Lawrence Durrell was even smaller, rising to just 5ft 2in in his stocking feet. The author of The Alexandria Quartet (1957-60) was ‘short and thick-set’, his first wife, Nancy, recalled. He was ‘small’, confirmed his second wife, Eve.
It wasn’t easy for Larry, who flew into a rage if Nancy, who was 5ft 8in, spent time alone in a room with a man who was taller than he was.
Apart from ominous hints, such as referring in his novel Justine to men ‘who have been deeply wounded in their sex’, Larry doesn’t dwell on concerns about his height in his fictional oeuvre, although the Quartet is filled with jealous characters.
As with many literary biographies, one of the great pleasures of this one by Michael Haag lies in its tracing the relationship between truth and art –including supposedly factual presentations of Larry’s life in his own writing, and in his brother Gerry’s knockabout account of their life on Corfu in the mid-1930s.
According to the latter in My Family and Other Animals (1956), the Durrells moved to Greece because they were sick of the English weather. The reality was
darker, as Haag reveals here, and it reflects a lot better on Larry.
His widowed mother, Louisa, had had a breakdown a couple of years earlier. She had even booked tickets to run away to India with the seven-year-old Gerry, abandoning the teenage Leslie and Margo. She was also an alcoholic. Larry, the man of the family since the age of 16, simply couldn’t leave her in England to look after his siblings alone.
It’s understandable that he doesn’t mention all this in Prospero’s Cell (1945), his memoir of those halcyon years.
Yet that book’s omissions are still striking. He doesn’t mention that the local priest took exception to his and Nancy’s nude sunbathing and got local boys to throw stones at them. He doesn’t mention their marital rows.
He doesn’t mention his mum, living up the road. When he says dramatically that they left on the very day that Britain declared war on Germany, it was a fib. They had upped sticks a few days earlier. Larry’s complicated relationship with the truth continued when Nancy left him in 1942.
‘My wife is being rather a nuisance at the moment,’ he wrote disingenuously to T S Eliot, who was his editor at Faber.
‘She’s gone up a tree; she won’t come down,’ he told Eve, who was to take Nancy’s place. Finally, he admitted to his friend Henry Miller, ‘We have split up; just the war I guess.’
Was it just the war? Or was it also Larry’s huge self-regard and sacrifice of himself and others in his lifelong quest to become a great writer?
It was a quest in which, incidentally, he succeeded. In 1938, Eliot described Larry’s novel The Black Book as ‘the
first piece of work by a new English writer to give me any hope for the future of prose fiction’.
In 1961, shortly after the publication of the Quartet, the critic George Steiner said the novelist represented ‘the best hope’ for saving literacy itself. He was nominated 11 times for the Nobel Prize.
Larry himself believed that a kind of lying was the task of the artist. One of the many strengths of this superb biography is its exegesis of his belief in the Heraldic Universe. That was the label he gave to an artistic escape from logic with, in Haag’s phrase, ‘its ruthless dualities of either/or, its conflict of opposites’.
Larry mystified in order to mesmerise. Gobbledegook, some of it, but pure poetry at its best – which, for my money, includes Prospero’s Cell.
Haag’s is a curious book. Unfinished when he died five years ago, his biography of Larry was to be his magnum opus. It remains a major achievement, even though it cuts out in 1945, when Larry, who lived to be 78, was only 33.
Yet by then he had written The Black Book and Prospero’s Cell and conceived the ideas that would develop into the Quartet.
The prose style of the biographer is as quiet and self-effacing as Larry’s is bombastic and insistent. It serves its subject well. By the end of its almost 500 pages, you feel you know the man, which is as much as any biographer can hope for.
Thomas W Hodgkinson is author of How to Sound Cultured
OLDIE NOVEL OF THE MONTH Sects and the City
FRANCES WILSON
The Pentecost Papers
By Ferdinand Mount Bloomsbury £18.99
The Pentecost Papers begins at the Beggar’s Hill Golf Club, N23 2HN.
Diplomatic correspondent Dickie Pentecost, whom we met first in Ferdinand Mount’s previous novel Making Nice, is pushing his trolley along the fairway when he hears a voice from a blackthorn, demanding to know if he is alone:
‘The blackthorn blossom was cold, dazzling white in the April sun, so white it was like a wonderful blank space, as if there was a hole in the view.’
God, Dickie notes, spoke to Moses
from a bush, but this voice belongs to a young man in a Pringle sweater who introduces himself as Timbo Smith.
Also known as Timothy, Bimbo, Tim and T, Timbo will soon be reported missing, presumed dead, in Brazil. Despite having hair the colour of ‘dried blood’, a ‘miasma of menace’, and mysteriously healing hands which cure back pain, Timbo, thinks Dickie, is the solid, dependable type.
Dickie himself, meanwhile, middleaged with a termagant wife and a job on a failing newspaper, feels ‘battered and ghostly’, a ‘superfluous’ figure in his own life, which is why he gets sucked into the following adventure.
‘I thought when I started,’ Dickie tells us, ‘that I would be the sole narrator of the story ... but then other narrators pressed into my head, protesting that there were bits that they and no one else had the right to tell.’
One of these is Timbo, who runs an outfit called the Ophion Group which may or may not exist. A master of plots and spinner of yarns, Timbo wins Dickie over with a tale about his grandfather, known as Moth (although there was ‘nothing mothlike about him’), before leading him into a labyrinth of hackers, brokers, loggers, hedge-funders and ‘shorters’, all of whom have stories of their own, also recorded by Dickie.
It is through Timbo that Dickie meets a femme fatale called Lee Thorald, known as Lethal, and her husband, Luke Deverill. He’s a lecherous philosophy professor from the East Midlands University (EMU), for whom life is not ‘an unfolding story’ because he has what he calls ‘an episodic personality’:
‘If you show me a photograph of myself as a child, I do not recognise that as being the Me I am today at this moment’.
The irony of this statement becomes apparent as Luke takes on an increasingly ‘narrative’ approach to his life, while Timbo, hooked on the continuity of the past, is soon unable to recognise his own face in the mirror.
Luke gives Dickie a lecture on the difference between those autobiographies where ‘the Self wobbles all over the place’ because ‘the author doesn’t seem to have a stable personality’, and those by ‘the Little Old Me type’ – where the author has ‘a fixed set of pretty sterling qualities’, evident from birth.
In Dickie’s own autobiography, The Pentecost Papers, the author, wondering whether he exists at all, casts himself as a minor character.
‘Some day, Luigi, we’re going to perfect this damn recipe for revenge’
Dickie is led by Timbo into a plot as dense and tangly as a jungle, which is in keeping with Mount’s subject. His epigraph is a joke from The Ha Ha Bonk Book: ‘Why can’t you play cards in the jungle? Too many cheetahs.’
The jungle in these pages refers to Amazon rainforests, where the main events take place, and ‘the trackless jungles of the City’, in which everyone is a cheater.
The chief cheaters are George Furcht, ‘one of the biggest loggers in the Western hemisphere’, currently 100 million in debt, and ‘Beaky’ Bentliff, head of Green Hedges, ‘the SAS in the battle to save our planet … the undercover troops of the green revolution’.
Ferdinand Mount, now 86, writes young and has an impressive grasp of financial scams.
His comedy lies in the neat clip of his sentences, the creation of dialogue which is both off-puttingly direct and consistently confusing, his pleasure in language (there is a bank called Keillor Garrison) and his allowing his outlandish plots to become more and more farcical.
We have bugging devices, facial reconstruction and a terrifying lunch composed of hogget, sweetbreads, tripe, clittering, smoked eel and pig’s trotters.
A writer’s writer, Mount pays homage to Edgar Allan’s Poe’s story The Purloined Letter, Thomas Hardy’s poetry, Wuthering Heights, St Augustine’s Confessions, Peter Fleming’s Brazilian Adventure, while placing Enid Blyton’s Bimbo and Topsy at the centre to the plot.
I was reminded at times of Graham Greene’s The Ministry of Fear, while his own tall stories, Timbo tells Dickie, are inspired by John le Carré and sci-fi.
This is a book to return to. Not only does Mount understand everything about the mess we have got ourselves into, but he explains it all in perfect prose.
Frances Wilson, The Oldie’s TV critic, is author of Electric Spark: The Enigma of Muriel Spark
FILM
HARRY MOUNT
HILL (12)
Being a nepo baby isn’t always easy. It certainly wasn’t easy for Damon Hill, the Formula 1 driver, having Graham Hill, the 1962 and 1968 World Champion, as a father.
Graham Hill was a driver out of a comic book – his moustache, sideburns, long hair and polo neck conspiring to produce a figure of extreme dashing flamboyance.
As Damon says, ‘If your dad is the star of the show, then who are you?’
In footage together, the young Damon was shy and diffident – tongue-tied when he’s interviewed with his father by a bubbly Bruce Forsyth.
One of the many virtues of this heartbreaking film, written and directed by Alex Holmes, is that, as a nepo baby, Damon has been documented in gripping footage since infancy.
And then, in 1975, Graham Hill was killed in a plane he was piloting, aged 46.
Arts
Damon, 15 at the time, saw the newsflash on telly and had to pass on the news to his mother. She screamed, ‘I knew it was too good to be true’ – because Graham had just given up the killer sport of racing.
It wasn’t the first time Damon had to break this sort of news. In 1968, aged seven, he told his mother about the death of the champion Jim Clark, 32, in a German race. Damon says of his father’s death, ‘That was the end, really.’ But it was also a beginning.
The film, available on Sky and Now TV, has the grand arc of Greek tragedy. Hill admits he never wanted to be a racing driver – his heroism is all the greater for his lack of egomania.
Now 64, Damon retains the gentleness of his childhood. But there is a deep steeliness and determination underneath the sad, nervous eyes – so dark-edged they look kohl-rimmed.
Hill was galvanised by his father’s death to fill the yawning void of his absence. And the way to do it, he resolved, was to emulate his father and become world champion.
It’s a near-impossible thing to do. The plane crash didn’t just mean a farewell to his dad. It was also goodbye to a rich, glamorous childhood. The plane wasn’t insured. Graham Hill didn’t have the right flying licence. He had borrowed money to get his new venture, Embassy Racing, off the ground.
And so the Hills’ house was sold to pay off the sudden debts. Damon became a courier. Yes, he was a keen motorcyclist but he didn’t take up car racing till the age of 23 – late in the driving world.
By the time he was 28, he was out of work, married, with a child on the way, who happens to have Down’s syndrome.
His wife, Georgie, is the real tearjerker of the film – clever, unflashy, infinitely loyal and observant. She said of her new boyfriend that when they got together, he was ‘one of the saddest people I’ve ever come across in my life’.
And then the nepotism at last helped a little – perhaps. Damon got a job as a test driver, testing Nigel Mansell’s Williams for Frank Williams.
When Mansell retired, Hill got his big chance in the team. But then death –forever on the starting grid – came calling yet again, when his charming teammate Ayrton Senna was killed in the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix.
Just as in the agonising film Senna (2010), the shock of his death is paradoxically heightened by the knowledge that it’s going to happen. As you watch footage of Senna, the handsome, 34-year-old triple champion, you think he must be invincible…
How brutal the fates are to the film’s participants – and not just on the racetrack. So many are killed or maimed.
Michael Schumacher, Damon Hill’s biggest rival, was struck with severe brain damage after a skiing fall. Frank Williams was paralysed after a car crash.
Like father, like son: Graham (1929-75) and Damon Hill, Silverstone, 1967
Hill’s racing partner at Williams, Jacques Villeneuve, is another tragic F1 nepo baby – his father, Gilles, was killed at the 1982 Belgian Grand Prix, at 32.
This constant undercurrent of tragedy – and the concomitant bravery of the drivers – means this film isn’t just for Formula 1 fans. It’s for anyone interested in the human condition.
And Damon Hill’s final triumph, after so many tribulations, as the 1996 World Champion, appeals to the non-fan too. When the new champion leaps out of his car to embrace his wife, I defy you not to cry.
THEATRE
WILLIAM COOK
THE CONSTANT WIFE
Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
Until 2nd August 2025
Has any writer fallen so swiftly and sharply out of favour as Somerset Maugham (1874-1965)?
From the 1890s to the 1960s, he was one of the most prolific authors in the English-speaking world. Yet nowadays only a few discerning oldies read his novels, and even fewer remember that he first made his name on the stage.
In 1908, Maugham had four shows running simultaneously in the West End. It wasn’t until the 1930s that his novels eclipsed his plays. When I heard that the RSC were staging his 1926 hit, The Constant Wife, I was thrilled. Unfortunately, like a lot of modern theatre, this suave revival isn’t quite what it seems.
The show got off to a flying start, but then my doubts began to grow. There was something a bit off about it. A few of the lines didn’t feel quite right. Some elements seemed suspiciously anachronistic.
What on earth was going on? At first, I put it down to overzealous direction – a tyro director trying to update an antique drama to make it more ‘relevant’ to younger theatregoers – but there was more to it than that.
I took a closer look at my programme – and my worst fears were confirmed: ‘The Constant Wife by Laura Wade, based on the play by W Somerset Maugham.’ An interview in the programme with Ms Wade revealed the dreadful truth: ‘The amazing theatre producer David Pugh … thought The Constant Wife was worth reviving but wanted a 21st-century female playwright to give the story a modern remix.’ Aargh!
If that was her brief, Wade was admirably restrained. The two plays are
extremely similar. Moreover, her plotting and stagecraft are actually significantly better. But that’s beside the point.
‘Maugham’s original play is so fecund and feminist and rich already – so we’ve just slightly polished up those aspects of it for modern audiences,’ she says (methinks protesting a bit too much).
‘We’ve tried to do it subtly – it shouldn’t be a game where you’re trying to work out which bits are mine and which bits are Maugham’s. I’ve just tried to make it more itself.’
But why should feminist aspects of old plays be ‘polished up’ for modern audiences? And how could her rewrite, however subtle, possibly ‘make it more itself’? Surely the play that’s most itself is the play Maugham wrote himself.
One of the pleasures of watching a vintage play is seeing how well (or badly) it’s aged. Once you know some lines aren’t Maugham’s, you end up doubting the authenticity of almost every utterance.
Wade’s reboot is very enjoyable –more enjoyable than the original, in fact. But, while the original leaves you with
food for thought, her new version feels rather superficial, sometimes teetering perilously on the edge of self-mockery.
Maugham’s story of a deceived wife who achieves financial independence was truly radical in 1926 (before women secured equal voting rights). This knowing reinterpretation doesn’t feel so daring.
I was reminded of Nahum Tate’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s King Lear, suitably ‘polished up’ with a happy ending to suit ‘modern audiences’ in the 18th century.
Does anyone revive that version? Will anyone revive this one? It’s the theatrical equivalent of a liger or tigon – attractive and intriguing yet infertile.
And yet the show I saw had something I’ll always remember – a magnificent performance by Jess Nesling as Constance Middleton, the cheated, undefeated wife. It’s an incredibly demanding role – above all for the emotional contortion it requires.
Constance must hide her emotions from the other characters, but she
Cheated, undefeated wife: Constance Middleton (here, Rose Leslie)
must reveal them to the audience. She must be simultaneously brave and brittle; fragile yet defiant. It’s a perfect paradox, and if an actress can pull it off, as Nesling does, it’s exhilarating.
We feel her hidden pain. We share her suppressed rage. We rejoice in her restrained triumph. We slightly fall in love with her. It feels like a performance she’s given a hundred times.
It was only at the curtain call that I realised this Constance bore no resemblance to the woman on the cover of my programme. ‘Due to the indisposition of Rose Leslie, the role of Constance will be played by Jess Nesling,’ read a slip of paper tucked inside. I thought of her all alone, learning all those lines, rehearsing and rehearsing for a part she thought she’d never play.
It felt like the outline of a short story by Somerset Maugham.
RADIO VALERIE GROVE
Few radio characters have appealed more to Oldie-readers than Radio 4’s Ed Reardon, the Grumpy Bard of Berkhamsted. For 20 years, his rants on Ed Reardon’s Week have reflected our shared irritation with the fatuities of modern life.
So a heartfelt hurrah to Christopher Douglas for carrying on writing and playing Ed in a new series, after the death
in 2022 of his much-missed co-writer and friend, Andrew Nickolds.
They had 42 years of laughter, epic lunches and gossipy discussions. Douglas says Nickolds was the one ‘more plugged into the news agenda’. I wonder who came up with Ed’s New Age daughter’s calling her son Smile.
Douglas solo, under BBC constraints, has had to reduce the cast, impose a tighter narrative and make Ed more a traditional sitcom in a world of stand-ups.
Barunka O’Shaughnessy still plays Ping, begging Ed to put on his ooh-arr rustic voice and shrieking with Sloaney laughter. Nicola Sanderson is neighbour Sheila with her Geordie ‘Oah! Noah!’ – plus a kitten that might be Elgar’s daughter. ‘Naming the kitten’ was instantly taken up by Ed’s Facebook fan club. I know her name – but no spoilers.
Ed’s strength is satirising life’s inanities in the digital age – such as having to order a drink in a pub by downloading the menu app from a website and then emailing the bar, having created a password.
‘A tad labyrinthine?’ says Ed.
‘Yeah, that’ll do,’ says the landlord.
Then a text comes back: ‘Incorrect password.’
Ed’s creative-writing classes for pensioners are over, as they’ve all cashed in their property and gone to Dubai. But he’s been asked to review a reprinted book for The Countrywoman mag (Unit 41, Europark Trading Estate, Willesden) because the young editor’s Cabinet Minister grandfather once had his memoirs pulverised by Ed in the Listener.
‘Literary vituperation is a lost art,’ declares Ed, recalling his 1980s demolition jobs of Gyles Brandreth and Melvyn Bragg.
He rummages in ancient cuttings, seeking his 1985 LRB review of the book in question, so he can recycle it. Well spotted, Christopher! Some ageing writers never write; only recycle.
The postman arrives. ‘Hardly worth getting your shorts on to deliver this adjectival drivel,’ mutters Ed, crumpling up the junk mail.
The envelope that looks like a BBC royalty turns out to contain yet another brochure for a retirement village, ‘thrown up by Chinese developers’, given a Vanbrughesque name – ‘Wentworth Park’; ‘Blenheim Abbey’ – and enclosing a voucher for afternoon tea if you take their tour and sign up to buy.
A dumbed-down Radio 3 – with Radio 3 luminaries playing themselves –is Ed’s top target now. He is ambushed by Radio 3 playing ‘Amol Rajan sings Sondheim’.
My 42-year-old son, who bonds with me over Ed, finds links between Reardon and Alan Partridge’s From the Oasthouse (Audible). ‘Both disgruntled, witty and judgemental, dining out on past successes: Alan’s BBC years before shooting someone on live TV; Ed’s episode of Tenko. Both filled with self-belief but facing the reality that their world has changed.’
But Partridge’s programme is written by a team. Alone, Christopher Douglas airs Ed’s 100th episode on 4th August. I only wish Ed, for whom a dangling modifier is a hanging offence, had heard Edward Vaizey on Times Radio in the Hugo Rifkind slot. Ed V kept saying ‘nucular’. Listeners clamoured to tell him the word is nuclear. But Lord Vaizey said he would jolly well carry on saying ‘nucular’ – so there. Ed R and I groan in unison. Then comes a bulletin putting grouches into perspective: news of the long-suffering subpostmasters and their struggle to get compensation for imprisonment and ruined lives. Tune in, in similar spirit, to Kate Lamble’s Derailed: The Story of HS2. And I recommend Fiona Shaw’s three-parter on Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway: authoritative, beautifully spoken and featuring the actual voice of VW. And New York 1925.
TELEVISION FRANCES WILSON
The new five-part adaptation of Richard Flanagan’s Booker Prize-winning novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North (BBC1), is not for the faint-hearted.
The title is taken from the 17thcentury Japanese poet Bashō’s spiritual travelogue of his journey from Tokyo into the remote north. The events unfold over three periods: before, during and after the Second World War.
Ed Reardon (Christopher Douglas)
In the pre-war narrative, the poetryloving protagonist Dorrigo Evans (Jacob Elordi) is a medical student in his native Australia. Engaged to the rich and beautiful Ella, he falls in love with Amy, the exciting young wife of his uncle, and their brief affair will be the most significant relationship of Dorrigo’s life.
The war scenes are set between 1942 and 1943 when Dorrigo’s regiment, the Australian Imperial Force, is captured during the Battle of Java. He reluctantly becomes commanding officer of the POWs, forced to work on the Thai Burma Railway, aka the Burma Death Railway because its construction claimed the lives of more than 12,000 soldiers and 90,000 civilians.
‘This railway is to carry more than supplies,’ Nakamura, the sadistic Japanese commander, tells Dorrigo in an electrifying scene. ‘It will carry the wisdom of Bashō to the world.’
When Dorrigo, who is struggling to save his skeletal men from starvation and cholera, says that the labour force are dying, Nakamura responds with one of many moral conundrums: ‘Do you not think that the British Empire was built on death? Your empire was built, syllable by syllable, bridge by bridge, on nonfreedom. All history is built by men like me’.
The horror of what the prisoners experience at the Thai railway camp,
including a random beheading performed by Nakamura, is the Heart of Darkness at the centre of Dorrigo’s consciousness.
In the postwar narrative, set in Sydney 1989, the elderly Dorrigo (played by Ciaran Hynes) has become a celebrated surgeon and war hero.
‘What do you recall most of your time as a prisoner?’ he is asked by a keen young woman in a television interview.
‘The strange, terrible, neverendingness of human beings,’ he replies in a tired voice. He adds, for clarity, ‘Our enemies were more monsters than men.’
The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the interviewer counters, were monstrous too. Dorigo is unimpressed.
‘You know one thing’, he snaps. ‘War is many things.’
Serially unfaithful to the adoring Ella, Dorrigo is now sleeping with the wife of a friend and colleague. In Flanagan’s novel, Dorrigo’s justification for his affair with Amy is that ‘the war pressed, the war deranged, the war undid, the war excused’. Fifty years later, his current affair might be similarly excused: the war has deranged and undone everything.
Hynes is magnificent as the complex, cynical, older Dorrigo, a flawed human who regards his celebrity as a failure on the part of others to perceive who he really is. Jacob Elordi is equally strong as the young, introverted doctor, ready to test his metal. The two Dorrigos, representatives of ignorance and knowledge, innocence and guilt, blend beautifully together in this intense character study.
Outrageous (BritBox) is another Second World War story. This time the subject is the impact of fascism on the Mitford family, torn apart when Unity Mitford falls in love with Hitler, whom she stalks in Munich until becoming one of his inner circle. When war is declared, Unity will put a bullet through her temple, leaving her with brain damage for the last nine years of her life.
The series begins in 1931, with Unity’s older sister Diana (Joanna Vanderham) newly married to the handsome, rich Bryan Guinness, but in love with the creepy Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists. In a few years’ time, Diana and Mosley will marry in the Goebbelses’ drawing room, with Hitler as guest of honour. The Mitfords were a fascinating family ‘who took the twentieth century by the throat’, as their biographer Mary S Lovell puts it.
Outrageous does nothing, though, to explore the roots of the sisters’ various
obsessions. The series, with its jolly jazz soundtrack, is as silly as Bridgerton and a good deal less entertaining than Downton Abbey.
The unremittingly wooden dialogue provides a historical commentary rather than showcasing the Mitford love of language. To dramatise the 1930s Depression, a group of hunger marchers are shown campaigning outside the window during Unity’s coming-out ball. ‘They’re suffering out there, while we’re stuck in here like dolls in a doll’s house,’ says Jessica (Zoe Brough), who will shortly run away with her Communist cousin, Esmond Romilly, to fight in the Spanish Civil War.
Watching Outrageous after The Narrow Road to the Deep North is to move from the sublime to the ridiculous.
MUSIC
RICHARD OSBORNE THE QUEEN OF SPADES LA TRAVIATA
The most consequential of this year’s summer opera season offerings have probably been Verdi’s La traviata at the Grange Festival, in Hampshire, and Tchaikovsky’s late masterpiece, The Queen of Spades, at Garsington.
I say ‘consequential’ because here are two of the 19th century’s greatest composers at critical moments in their lives creating music dramas that tell us of the social values of their age and the psychopathologies of the composers who chose to confront them.
Alexander Pushkin’s short story The Queen of Spades concerns Herman, a rigidly self-disciplined yet emotionally unstable German-born engineer in
Sister act: Bessie Carter as Nancy Mitford in Outrageous
Tchaikovsky with Nikolay and Medea Figner, who first played Herman and Lisa in The Queen of Spades in 1890
the Russian Imperial army. He eschews gambling, yet ends up losing both his money and his mind in pursuit of an ageing countess and the identity of three cards that promise instant wealth.
It was Tchaikovsky’s younger brother, Modest, who’d turned this 40-page tale into a full-scale opera by setting it against the background of late-18th-century St Petersburg in all its courtly splendour.
After two composers chickened out, the elder Tchaikovsky seized the libretto, trimming and adapting it at white heat over a period of just 44 days in Florence in early 1890.
Psychological thrillers in picturesque settings have long been something of a stock-in-trade. This is one of the best.
The role of Herman, the opera’s anti-hero, was written for the 33-year-old lyric-dramatic tenor Nikolay Figner, famous for a dry, somewhat colourless voice which he deployed with rare expressive power.
This has proved difficult to replicate, particularly for non-Russians. Go to Georgi Nelepp on a 1952 Bolshoi recording for the drama of the role, or Vladimir Atlantov, on a 1974 recording also from the Bolshoi, for its lyric aspect. Garsington’s Aaron Cawley was more of an impact merchant.
The role of the Countess, a relic from a vanished age who lives in memory alone, was superbly played and sung by Garsington’s Diana Montague. Laura Wilde did all that could be expected of Lisa, the countess’s niece – a mere go-between in the Pushkin.
The best singing came from Roderick Williams in the specially created baritone role of Lisa’s tragically denied husbandin-waiting, Prince Yeletsky. Williams had just one aria and I heard nothing better all summer.
St Petersburg’s famous Mariinsky Theatre would have relished the opera’s many effects: the gambling dens, ballroom scenes and court pastorals, not to mention the sudden storms and ghostly apparitions. So did Garsington’s closely integrated team of designer Tom Piper and directors of lighting and movement, Lizzie Powell and Lucy Burge.
The St Petersburg scenes were ravishing to look at – both the court pastoral and the lovely opening panorama, with its schoolboy soldiers and flocks of pampered children and their nursemaids.
And how good the Garsington children’s Russian was – or so two Russian ladies assured me. ‘The principals, so-so; the children, wow!’
It’s true that Lisa’s canal-side suicide eluded the resources of the Garsington theatre, but that can be partly blamed on the Tchaikovsky brothers’ love of melodrama. In Pushkin, she survives to marry a civil servant.
Mostly well-directed, the opera was superbly conducted by Douglas Boyd. It might have been Yevgeny Svetlanov in the pit, so keen were the rhythms, so brazen the clamour of the Philharmonia Orchestra’s Russian-sounding brass.
Conductors matter. It was something of a coup for Grange Festival director Michael Chance to secure for La traviata the services of Richard Farnes, arguably the country’s finest Verdi conductor. As also it was to pair him with the Violetta of Samantha Clarke, with whom Farnes had already worked.
The opera derives from the stage version by Alexandre Dumas fils of his novel La Dame aux camélias, a famous vehicle for the likes of Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse.
And they propelled Bob Marley to international renown. But the road to get there was bumpy and full of potholes, not least his fractious reputation when he was signed to Chris Blackwell’s Island Records three years earlier.
‘All champagne and tears: fresh perversity, fresh credulity, fresh passion, fresh pain’ was how Henry James described Duse in the role.
Yet the opera goes deeper. It’s simpler and more unremitting in its laying bare the price social hypocrisy exacts.
Violetta, Verdi insisted, is a role that requires a singer of presence, as opposed to a great singer. It’s only after the dazzling scene-setting opening act that the real drama begins, as Violetta, stricken by advancing illness, undergoes her slow martyrdom at the hands of a family who can’t live with the embarrassment of their son’s continuing liaison with a former courtesan.
The weaker Violetta grows, the greater she becomes. It was an ascent movingly realised by Clarke, backed by Farnes’s exemplary conducting and Maxine Braham’s no-frills staging, set in 1850s France, as Verdi had always wanted.
GOLDEN OLDIES
MARK ELLEN
BOB’S BIG BREAK
Happy 50th birthday to the greatest shows ever recorded!
There were two of them, on consecutive nights at the Lyceum in the Strand in late July 1975 – nights so sweltering that its retractable roof was rolled back and people could see the stars.
Fiery-tempered and not averse to a physical brawl, he’d been toughened by years of ruinous deals in the gangster world of the ’60s Jamaican music business and he trusted nobody. So when Blackwell, after huge success in the new albums market with Free, King Crimson and Emerson, Lake & Palmer, told him he planned to remodel the Wailers’ roughshod reggae for the same white student rock audience, it didn’t go down too well.
But he managed it, polishing and sharpening their sound and sweetening it with familiar Western signatures such as lead guitar solos. And he even expanded the band’s name to Bob Marley and the Wailers, to put the spotlight on its singer, songwriter and, it was hoped, superstar.
But still there were no significant sales, despite the applause of the press and the rock cognoscenti (Keith Richards stumbled on-stage in a Bob Marley T-shirt), until another classic – if slightly dispiriting – example of a white star’s version of a black musician’s track bringing it to a wider public.
In the same way that Elvis Presley’s Hound Dog outstripped Big Mama Thornton’s rendition, or Pat Boone’s Sweet Little Sixteen trounced the Chuck Berry blueprint, or the white rapper Eminem finally brought hip-hop to the masses, it took Eric Clapton’s cover of Bob’s flop single I Shot The Sheriff to make the first Marley song a hit.
But Blackwell’s commercial
Funky reggae party: Live! by Bob Marley and the Wailers, recorded at the Lyceum, 1975
masterstroke was to come. Convinced the Wailers’ records had never captured the mesmerising, rubbery bounce and spontaneity of their live sound, he parked the Rolling Stones’ mobile studio outside the Lyceum Ballroom in a last-ditch attempt to bottle it and make some hay.
The recordings were a revelation. Everything about those shows seemed new, dazzling and extraordinary. The way the band spoke – in a glorious, coded, faintly lawless patois. The way they looked – their whirling dreadlocks, sinuous, skanking dance moves, and red, gold and green flags. The poster of Haile Selassie behind them – Selassie revered in their cryptic Rastafarian religion as the living son of God.
And the songs they played, which spoke of the struggle of the starving and oppressed in Kingston’s ghettos against a corrupt and hypocritical ruling class.
For those of us who’d grown up in the Home Counties listening to Joni Mitchell, it was mind-blowing.
Blackwell released one of the two nights’ highlights, No Woman, No Cry, and the Live! album four months later. And Marley never looked back.
If you need proof they were the greatest concerts on record, just listen –and imagine being there. Many happy returns!
EXHIBITIONS
HUON MALLALIEU
MAGNA CARTA 1225
Society of Antiquaries of London, 23rd July to 19th September
Even if Sellar and Yeatman didn’t consider it a memorable date, most people do remember that Magna Carta was signed in 1215.
Well, yes and no. In that first form, it was indeed forced on King John by the barons at Runnymede on 15th June 1215. It was intended to be a peace treaty between them.
That did not work, but an expanded and amended version was reissued in 1217 by the Regency for the young King Henry III. The Forest Charter, dealing with rights for ‘free men’ rather than just the barons, was added to it. In the story of democracy, the Forest Charter is arguably more important.
These agreements were then reissued in 1225, of the king’s ‘spontaneous and free will’ and with the full authority of his great seal. That is the 800th anniversary celebrated by this exhibition.
Right: the Halesowen Abbey Scroll, 13th century. Below: the 14th-century Hart Book of Statutes
As a learned body second only to the Royal Society, the Antiquaries, founded in 1707 and granted its own Royal Charter in 1751, strives for ‘the encouragement, advancement and furtherance of the study and knowledge of antiquities and history of this and other countries’.
The tenure of its handsome premises in the courtyard of Burlington House, Piccadilly, recently under threat from the Treasury, has now been safeguarded.
The exhibition, which is free, is an admirable opportunity for a wider public to discover a very special place. From its beginnings, the Society has attracted extraordinary donations, including three 13th-century copies of the Charter – one a 1225 reissue. Much of the exhibition is drawn from its own collections.
Another such donation is the Lindsey Psalter, an illuminated prayer book owned by the Abbot of Peterborough from 1214 to 1222, and bequeathed to the Society by the Bishop of Carlisle in 1768. Also beautifully illuminated is a 14th-century copy of the two 1225 charters.
The political importance of Magna Carta faded over time until it was revived by Thomas More, who cited it in his defence during his trial in 1535. Its influence on later political thinkers, including America’s Founding Fathers, is unequalled.
Henry III is even more important to the story than wicked King John. The show includes a drawing of Henry III’s tomb in Westminster Abbey, probably made by William Blake as an apprentice.
The exhibition charts the Great Charter’s fluctuating history, and brings it up to date with the rap album Magna Carta Holy Grail by Jay-Z.
GARDENING
DAVID WHEELER
DOG DAYS OF AUGUST
Never mind Kevin. We need to talk about August.
It can be a tricky month. The weather can be all over the place, and holidays can leave plots to care for themselves for a couple of weeks.
Janus-like, the August garden faces two ways. It laments the passing of irises, tulips, (most) magnolias, floriferous dogwoods and the empirical rhododendron and camellia families.
Yet it welcomes the dahlias, chrysanthemums, autumnflowering gentians and – a blast of trumpets, please – the fabulous brigade of Michaelmas daisies.
Roses, of course, flank the divide. And deadheading ensures blooming encores from delphiniums and Canterbury bells (sans archbishop). Hydrangeas and butterflyattracting buddleias are unstoppable.
Flower colours of big-leaf coastal hydrangeas (H macrophylla) and their smaller-leafed, mountain-dwelling H serrata cousins are famously influenced by soil conditions.
Put simply, limy (alkaline) soil promotes pink and red florets. Acid soil encourages blue and the deepest Vatican purples.
But it isn’t quite that simple. Acid soil also needs aluminium to do the trick convincingly. And if your deep and lovingly nurtured loam is short of this mineral, coveted shades of blue can be triggered by a dressing of aluminium sulphate, usually branded in retail outlets as hydrangea colourant.
It’s not, however, an overnight
remedy. No amount of aluminium will turn your pink hydrangeas blue right now. Apply it as per the instructions on the packaging early next year when the plants come into leaf and, with luck, the pinkos might well be blue 12 months hence.
White-flowered macrophylla and serrata kinds won’t change colour – unless you place cut stems in a vase of water dosed with coloured ink. Thought: did green ink grant Mr Wilde his famous green carnation?
The paniculata hydrangeas, creamy-white in flower, fading naturally to an array of fruit-fool pinks, and the oak-leaved types with heads of creamy curds, are similarly unaffected by soil conditions.
The botanists among you will say if I’m wrong. But I don’t know of another group of plants whose flower colours are so extremely (or, indeed, at all) influenced by soil conditions.
Certainly not the above-mentioned Michaelmas daisies. Rainbow-like, these come in hues from pure white through pink and mauve to blue. Still, they properly belong to September’s canvas: Michaelmas, the feast of the eponymous St Michael, isn’t until 29th September.
Meanwhile, August bestows a glorious cavalcade of salvias, many with kneeand waist-high spires of deepest indigo and near-black flowers. Grow them for dramatic effects among August’s gilded array of heleniums, helianthus, golden rods, yarrows, inulas and the wholly sumptuous rudbeckias.
As for Kevin, his deadly deeds might not have happened had he been closeted in his bedroom glued to a gaming
console. But, I hear you say, teenage video games are all about killing.
Still, news reaches me of Grow a Garden, ‘the surprise Roblox gaming hit’ which involves players slowly developing a little patch of virtual land.
The BBC said, ‘It’s something that, earlier this month, more than 16 million people – many of them children – chose to spend their weekend doing.’
What is it about this plant-growing simulation, the BBC asked, ‘that has got so many people hooked – and could it persuade more people into real-life gardens?’
Some garden centres give a modest discount to oldies on a specified day each week. How about a youngsters’ discount throughout the school holidays?
David’s Instagram account is @hortusjournal
KITCHEN GARDEN SIMON COURTAULD MARIGOLDS
I associate marigolds with municipal gardens and urban parks, their garish yellow-orange flowers often planted in serried rows or precise geometrical patterns. They do not enhance a border in a private garden, in my opinion. But they have their uses in the kitchen garden.
There are two different types of marigold: tagetes and calendula. The various tagetes, of which there are 30 or more species, originate from America – Central and South – though one of the varieties most relevant for the kitchen garden and greenhouse is known as French marigold. This marigold should flower within weeks of sowing and will grow to a height of no more than 12 inches. When it’s placed near tomato and cucumber plants, the scent of the flowers and leaves will help to repel whitefly. The marigolds need
Mountain-dwelling
H serrata
little attention apart from deadheading to prolong their life through the summer.
The Mexican marigold, also called African, can grow to over four feet tall. It helps protect potatoes from eelworm, and its roots will suppress and kill any bindweed, couch grass or ground elder growing nearby. This marigold is also culturally associated with death, in the decoration of family altars for the annual Day of the Dead festival in Mexico.
Mexicans will use some marigold leaves as a substitute for tarragon. Other marigolds, such as signet, are edible and their flowers have a lemony scent and flavour which may repel aphids.
Calendula, or pot marigold, which attracts aphid-eating insects, should also be planted among vegetables, and their flowers and leaves can be eaten or used as decoration. If I were going to grow a marigold purely for its appearance, I would choose the calendula ‘Ivory Princess’, which has creamy-coloured petals, but I might not eat it.
Marigolds are generally not toxic but, if eaten in quantity, may cause skin irritation. I have occasionally chewed on the flowers of sage and purple basil, and I am told that the petals of dahlias, tulips and cornflowers are also edible.
Together with marigolds, here are the makings of a colourful summer salad.
COOKERY
ELISABETH LUARD JAM TODAY
The secret of happiness in a northern climate (global warming notwithstanding) is sweetness.
Take jam, for instance. Now’s the time to favour stone fruit: plum, apricot, damsons – with quince and medlar on the way. Mrs Beeton, Elizabeth David and Jane Grigson agreed that the fine raw materials available on this blessed isle should be allowed to speak for themselves. Fruit, in the form of jams and jellies, does exactly that.
So when you’re done with the glory of pies and tarts, scrub out the empty jam jars and stock up the larder.
Basic rules for jam-makers
The great Eliza Acton, Mrs Beeton’s inspiration, offers ‘General Rules and Directions for Preserving’ in Modern Cookery in 1845. Here’s the gist:
1) Make sure all utensils are clean and dry, especially jars and bottles.
2) Sugar sticks – and burns easily. Keep the bottom of the preserving pan away from contact with direct heat. Use a simmering mat.
3) After the sugar is added, stir the
preserve gently at first and more quickly towards the end. Keep watch throughout.
4) All preserves should be perfectly cleared of the scum as it rises.
5) Fruit to be preserved with sugar must first be blanched, macerated or lightly cooked to soften its exterior to allow syrup to be absorbed. Otherwise you’ll end up with hard little bullets rather than soft, juicy fruit.
6) For a clear, pure-flavoured jam, give the fruit a rapid boiling to reduce the juices before adding the sugar.
7) Use a wooden spoon for stirring. This will tell you when setting point is reached by the way a drop forms on the spoon edge when it’s lifted from the pot.
8) Use special preserving sugar, as it will throw up less scum.
Apricot-and-custard tart
A buttery shortcrust pastry filled with apricots set in an egg custard: perfect for a tea party in the orchard after a long day of preserving and potting. Watch out for the wasps. Serves 6 (invite the neighbours).
The pastry
250g plain flour
Pinch of salt
175g cold unsalted butter
50g caster sugar
2 egg yolks (save the whites for meringues)
The filling
150ml double cream
2 whole eggs (medium size)
2 tbsps caster sugar
About 500g apricots, stoned and halved
To finish
4 tbsps sieved apricot jam, melted
First make the pastry. Sieve the flour with the salt. Cut in the butter with a knife, or freeze and grate. When the mixture looks like fine breadcrumbs, mix in the sugar.
Work in the egg yolks with the tips of your fingers till it forms a softish ball –you may need a little more flour or a splash of cold water. Cover and leave to rest in a cool place for half an hour or so.
Preheat the oven to 350°F/180°C/Gas 4. Roll out the pastry to fit an 8”-diameter tart tin. Line with foil weighted with a handful of beans or dry rice. Bake the case ‘blind’ for 15 minutes to set the surface. Remove the foil gently and leave to cool. Arrange the apricots, cut side down, in a circular pattern on the tart base. Whisk the cream with the eggs and sugar, and spoon the mixture around the apricots. Bake for 30 minutes or so, until the custard is just set and the pastry’s perfectly crisp and golden. Remove from the oven and allow to cool a little. Glaze with the sieved, melted jam (diluted, if necessary).
A jug of iced tea with lemon seems appropriate, I think – don’t you?
RESTAURANTS JAMES PEMBROKE
HEAVEN-ON-THAMES
Foreign tourists always marvel at the thousand acres of London’s parks and gardens. But few of them make it down to our glorious river, even when we pronounce the ‘TH’ for their benefit.
And the Thames is London’s great saviour, a huge watery blast of fresh air from the flat lands of Flanders.
My favourite stretch is the north bank from Hammersmith to Barnes Bridge but I keep finding myself drawn to the South Bank area. I used to think I was visiting only to see a wonderful film at the BFI, but that’s not really true – I find it impossible to struggle to the end of their foreign epics.
Does anyone make it to the credits? My last attempt was The Piano Teacher (La Pianiste) with Isabelle Huppert, billed as an ‘erotic psychological thriller’.
It was none of these things. Just horrid. The Oldie’s cartoon-book editor and I are still disturbed. And we got out before what must have been the grisliest of endings, judging by the first 70 minutes of anguish.
Our evening restarted at the Anchor & Hope in The Cut, London’s best gastropub by far. They have lots of tables outside and wine at £28 a bottle. Most of all, I am amazed by their ability to serve up the most genuine dishes, such as their polpo, as if you’re in Galicia.
Talking of which, for a riverside seat, head to La Gamba, which is well worth missing a season of Almodóvar for.
I skipped school last Friday to bicycle from Hammersmith Bridge to Chiswick Mall. First pitstop was for a pint of London Pride on the tiny riverside terrace at the Dove – hang-out of James Thomson, composer of Rule Britannia – followed by a quick gander at the
William Morris Museum. On through Hammersmith Terrace, where the calligrapher Edward Johnston drew his eponymous font (doors down from the Dovecote Press), to the Black Lion, which has pheasants provocatively hanging outside all autumn.
We then went back on ourselves and had lunch at the River Café Café. That isn’t a typo – it’s the caff of London’s most expensive restaurant.
Unlike the main event, which is set back from the river, the Café Café is right by the towpath and it’s a third of the price: pasta around £22 and pizza romana (with anchovies and capers) for a tenner. The wine starts at around £50 but, hey, you leave with your shirt on.
Then home for a rest before returning for dinner at tiny Neapolitan Mari. Again it has outside tables for two, clinging to the building; the couple next to us were on their first date. How could they fail to lift off?
The dinner menu is straightforward: starters for £13.59 and main courses for £21. And an espresso is just £1. We were so blown away that we booked a table for 16 for a birthday dinner. We will have the whole place to ourselves and feast on a £40 set menu, with Gavi di Gavi at £25 a bottle.
And then you reach Chiswick Mall, my ultimate ‘when-I-win-the-pools’ street (I have never bought a strip), looking across at Chiswick Eyot, the pretty island you can walk to at low tide. And gather some willow shoots to make a basket.
It’s London’s paradise.
DRINK
BILL KNOTT
SUMMER SPARKLE
One – come to think of it, perhaps the only – welcome aspect of the UK’s Byzantine new system for calculating alcohol duty is that sparkling wines are now taxed at the same level as still wines. There are (relatively speaking) some bargains to be had.
This is generally not true in Champagne, where producers frown upon any attempt to dilute the prestige of their product; nor in England, where economies of scale have yet to emerge in our burgeoning, but still tiny, winemaking economy.
Look to Spain, the Limoux and the Loire, however, and you can pop many a summery cork with gay abandon.
There are several ways to make wine fizzy. You can simply pump it with carbon dioxide, which lends vinho verde its
refreshing spritz. Or there is the ancestrel method, in which the wine is bottled while still fermenting. Yeast devours the remaining sugars and the resultant CO2 is trapped in the bottle.
This is both the most ancient method – dating back to 16th-century Limoux –and the trendiest. It’s responsible for many of the brightly labelled, crowncapped bottles on the shelves of achingly hip wine bars. Known as pét nat, some of them are rather good, although they are rarely cheap.
And there is the Charmat – or tank – method, used most famously for prosecco. Wines undergo secondary fermentation in a pressurised tank before bottling. Almost all wines made this way are bottled and sold when still young, and intended to be drunk within a year or so. Pleasantly grapey and frothy, the best examples work well with charcuterie.
To my palate, though, the best fizz is made by the traditional method (what we called méthode champenoise until the term was banned about 30 years ago).
Technological advances on what was originally a laborious process now permit the likes of Tesco to sell their thoroughly delicious Blanquette de Limoux 1531 for £9. (A friend asked me, tongue in cheek, when I thought Tesco would move to the 1532 vintage.) With a 25-per-cent discount if you buy six bottles, a frequent Tesco offer, it is £6.75, an almost absurdly low price.
Cava is produced in several Spanish regions. The vast majority comes from Catalunya, where the two ‘big beasts’ are Codorníu and Freixenet. My current favourite cavas are Waitrose’s No 1 Castillo Perelada Brut (£12.50, but again often on offer), with a tang of citrus and nice length; and the Wine Society’s newly released Exhibition Gran Reserva 2021 (£10.95 as an introductory offer), which benefits from 30 months on its lees and another year in bottle.
Then there is crémant, made in the traditional manner by a host of different French wine regions. My recent booze cruise to Calais (see the July issue) yielded three cases of fizz from the Saumur-based Bouvet Ladubay, all made from Chenin Blanc and an occasional splash of Chardonnay.
The good news for those unwilling to hop on a ferry is that Majestic stocks several of them, including their Brut NV at a mere £10 if you mix six bottles, and magnums of the pleasingly peachy Bouvet Saphir 2021 (£32).
Nothing adds sparkle to a summer party quite like a chilly magnum of delicious fizz.
This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle, all-French case comprising four bottles each of three wines: a zippy Picpoul from the south of France; a classy rosé from about 150 miles further east, in Provence; and a splendidly summery red from the cooler climate of the Loire. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine.
Picpoul de Pinet ‘Les Moules’ 2024, offer price £10.50, case price £126.00 Crisp, savoury white: sacrifice a splash for your moules à la marinière and put the rest on the table.
Château L’Escarelle Rosé, AOP Côteaux Varois de Provence, offer price £14.95, case price £179.40 Smart rosé: pale, fresh, lively and subtly fruity. Perfect with a plate of saucisson sec and a few almonds.
Gamay, Domaine Villemaine, Loire Valley 2024, offer price £13.95, case price £167.40
Young, vibrant red from the Beaujolais grape: juicy as a summer pudding, and best served slightly chilled.
Mixed case price £157.60 – a saving of £31.99 (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 16th September 2025
JIM WHITE
GOD ON THE TYNE
The idea for a book can come from all sorts of places. For sportswriter Spencer Vignes, it was at his local pub quiz that inspiration struck.
‘Which foreign-born footballer,’ was the question that caught his attention, ‘holds the record for the most goals scored in a season in English top-flight football?’ Easy, he thought: Erling Haaland, Man City’s prolific Norwegian. Wrong: Haaland was actually born in Leeds, where his old man was playing the game.
All right then: Mo Salah. No, not him. Sergio Aguero? Cristiano Ronaldo? Thierry Henry? Didier Drogba?
None of them. The answer had Vignes scratching his head. It turns out the record still belongs to a striker from the distant past.
In fact, he was the first foreign-born player to grace the English first division. His name was George Robledo (1926-89), the Chile-born forward who scored 33 times for Newcastle in the 1951-52 league season.
For good measure he added the winning goal in that year’s FA Cup Final. It was a photograph of that strike that a young John Lennon recreated in oil paint, an image he later used for the cover of his 1974 album, Walls and Bridges
While the youthful Lennon might have been inspired by his achievements, Vignes knew nothing about Robledo.
So he decided to find out. The result, after extensive trawling of the archives and talking to those who knew Robledo, including his daughter, is the book Postcards from Santiago, a beautifully delivered tale of a proper trailblazer.
And what a story it is. One of bravery, adventure, glory and disappointment. One pockmarked too by parental desertion, war and probable murder.
Robledo was born on the fringes of the Atacama desert in 1926. His mother was the secretary to the British head of a mining business, his father the company accountant. When George was six, as Chile reeled under the Great Depression, his family decided to relocate to England.
Not quite all the family. His father, at the last moment, bottled it, leaving the boat for some cigarettes, never to return.
So George, his mum and two brothers settled in Barnsley – where the lads discovered they were rather good at football.
War put a halt to his development in the professional game. He was recruited as a Bevin Boy and worked in the local pit.
In 1945, he was signed by Barnsley and proved to be some footballer. He and his brother, Ted, were soon bought by
Newcastle, where George was so good that he was picked to play for Chile in the 1950 World Cup. His goals in Brazil in that competition turned him into a national hero – this despite the fact the good-looking lad with the thick Yorkshire accent couldn’t speak a word of Spanish.
In 1954, Chile’s leading club Colo-Colo made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. He was happy to go, as long as Ted went too. And the pair lit up the Chilean league.
While playing there, George met his wife (and on one traumatic occasion, his dad, too). He stayed on in the country after retirement, eventually becoming a sports teacher. Ted, meanwhile, sought new horizons in Dubai, where, on a sailing trip, he fell in the sea and died.
Subsequent investigations, Vignes discovers, suggest he was dead before he hit the water. No one was ever charged with his murder.
George remained a national hero. When he died in 1989, the whole of Chile went into mourning. Back in England, apart from in Newcastle, the memory of his brilliance had long faded.
Now, thanks to Vignes, with his reputation revived he has been rescued from being just a pub-quiz question. It’s about time.
Postcards from Santiago by Spencer Vignes is out now
MOTORING
ALAN JUDD
END OF THE ROAD FOR DRIVERS
There is a media fuss about the prospect – threat, as some see it – of autonomous vehicles ie self-driving cars.
Predictably, all manner of problems and potential disadvantages have been quoted. The problems, technical and legal, are real enough. But, nevertheless, the advent of fully self-driving cars could be a boon to Oldie-readers.
The reason for the fuss was taxi firm Uber’s announcement that they intend to test self-driving taxis in London next year.
This was made possible by the government’s bringing forward rules allowing driverless taxis and buses from 2026. The Uber trial is in association with Wayve, a Cambridge-based autonomousdriving and AI start-up. It’s not yet known which breeds of car they’ll use.
Like many technological developments, experiments with autonomous vehicles – call them AVs – go back much further than we think; in this case, to the 1920s.
In fact, we’ve been living with elements of them for some time – cruise control dates from 1948. But recent
developments have led to ever greater deployment of ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems, such as lane control etc). Under EU law, such features are now mandated for new cars.
Accidents and failures of the new technology are well-publicised. Elaine Herzberg of Arizona was killed by a self-driving Uber taxi in 2018. An AV operated by Google’s Waymo ran into a utility pole last year. Its software didn’t register stationary slim vertical objects, and its 672-strong Jaguar I-Pace fleet was withdrawn for modifications.
AVs are classified into internationally recognised degrees of autonomy, ranging from nought to five. Nought means no automation at all and five means ‘The system controls the vehicle under all conditions and circumstances.’
Uber plan Level 4 tests, under which ADAS controls all aspects of driving. But if a driver ‘does not respond appropriately to a request to intervene, the car can stop safely’. It was a Level 4 car that ran into the pole. Tesla aspire to put up to a million Level 2 cars on US roads by the end of next year.
We’ll hear about it soon enough if Uber taxis bounce off telegraph poles, though it wouldn’t make the news if you or I did it in our Level 0 cars.
In choosing to trial in London, Uber are biting the bullet. Unlike grid-patterned US cities, which might have been – often were – built for the car, London retains much of its medieval street pattern.
And, crucially, pedestrians wander at will over our roads. In many cities, that’s not allowed. Maintaining progress while avoiding small, moving bodies, especially in multiples, is testing for AV systems.
Ditto narrow country lanes with no markings. They often have no room for passing without leaving the road and they’re occasionally populated by tractors, horses, cyclists, walkers, deer, foxes and badgers. I suspect we’re a long way from Level 5 on any roads except carefully curated, designated routes.
But when – if – Level 5 does come, it will be a boon for my nonagenarian friend Edith, who lives down the lane. Edith has been driving for over 70 years and still loves it. She enjoys the physical manipulation, the rapid effortless progress unknown to our ancestors and, above all, the independence it bestows.
But now, as with many of us, failing eyesight is blurring the open road. She already drives an EV. But if she could look forward to the day when it turns into an AV, and she could simply hop in and tell it where to go, it would make all the difference. Bring it on.
Matthew Webster: Digital Life
Not so intelligent Artificial Intelligence
I am going to commit heresy: Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not as impressive as we are being told.
It will not kill us all or take over the world. It is not more important than the internet, or even the telephone. It might be about as consequential as either, but certainly no more so.
Of course, Oldie-readers may not see these views as heresy, but there are many who would. Broadcasters are in thrall to AI all the time. Politicians (on all sides) yearn for their country to become an ‘AI superpower’. Investors worldwide are pouring huge sums into new companies trying to develop AI products that will
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make their fortunes. And existing businesses are jumping onto the bandwagon by urgently claiming they are using AI to improve their processes, which they say will increase their profits.
Where have we heard this before? There is nothing new under the sun; the same things keep popping up in different disguises. The current AI obsession has all the hallmarks of the original internet boom in the 1990s and it will go the same way. A few companies may make gigantic fortunes but, just as happened before, most AI-related enterprises will fail.
But, the AI disciples cry, it’s different now, because we are witnessing the birth of semi-human intelligence. No, we aren’t – at least not intelligence as we humans know it. If you rename AI ‘machine learning’ (which is what it is), you’ll realise its limitations.
The technology behind AI is impressive, without doubt, but strip it bare and it’s fairly simple. It makes possible the reading, sifting and searching of gigantic amounts of information in a flash. Very impressive, but that is all it’s doing: regurgitating what it has read in accordance with its instructions from you.
Contrarian thinker Emily Bender, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Washington and an expert in how computers model language, compares this to an intelligent octopus eavesdropping on human conversation. It may be able to pick up patterns and trends but will never understand
meaning or intent. What it can do, however, is repeat mistakes made by others and maybe even reinforce them.
Of course, AI does have its uses. Take the app Shazam, which you can add to your phone. It will identify the musical recording you are listening to by comparing what it hears with a gargantuan database of recordings provided by the music publishers. When it finds a match, it lets you know. This is possible only using AI.
There’s also no doubt that using AI-powered ChatGPT to search the internet is a significant improvement on old-fashioned Google, but it’s still just doing the same job – in a more sophisticated way.
So, AI can be useful, but it is not human and has no genuine human traits.
I don’t rule out some Nobel Prizewinning advance that really does create ‘intelligence’ as we humans know it, but I’m not holding my breath.
For the moment, the emperor is parading down the street naked. But too many people have vested interests in him staying that way. And many more are so caught up in the excitement that their eyes are dimmed. However, before long, the small boy will pipe up, and the truth will out.
AI is not all it’s cracked up to be. It is simply the next stage of automation wrapped up in a sequinned gown.
When the gown slips off, as it will, all that’s left is a machine – and no more than a machine.
Neil Collins: Money Matters
Financial patience is a virtue
A guaranteed yield of 2.1 per cent on your capital does not sound like much. But what if that return on both the capital and the dividend were indexed to inflation?
It sounds almost too good to be true, and would certainly look suspicious but for the fact that the guarantee is from HM Government.
In other words, this is about as risk-free as investment gets, provided you can be patient, since this government
stock will not be repaid until 2054. It’s unlikely that either of us will still be around then, but hear me out.
The stock I have in mind, called 1¼-per-cent Index-linked Treasury Gilt 2054, cost around £85 per £100 of stock at the time of writing. In other words, pay £85 today and get back £100 29 years hence, and £1.50 a year in dividends until then.
That may not sound very attractive, but the proceeds will have the same
buying power then as when the stock was issued last January. Meantime, your income will also rise with the Consumer Prices Index – so the buying power of the dividend is maintained. If you need the capital, you can sell the stock in the market instantly.
You would have to take the market price, which might be lower, but the price of these stocks tends to rise as their life shortens. An indexed stock with ten years to run currently returns
about 1.5 per cent (inflation linked). The yield is the inverse of the price. You can keep track of government stock prices at dividenddata.co.uk.
The additional bonus is that gains on government securities are free of capital gains tax (CGT), thanks to Nigel Lawson. As Chancellor, he exempted gilts from CGT, claiming that scrapping this tax would actually raise money. He was right. Government stocks were standing at
big discounts to their issue prices, and investors had been able to set their losses against gains on their shareholdings. No government has been able to afford to change the rules since. The income is taxable unless you buy the stock for your ISA, in which case the taxman won’t touch it.
As always, there is no accounting for how capricious or vindictive a desperate government can be. Whichever party is in charge, they are always short of money.
Come to the real
However, it would be foolhardy in the extreme to go after those who have helped to bridge its spending gap by taxing them for doing so. It would be obviously counter-productive too, because the next round of fundraising would be more expensive.
Still, there’s no cure for stupidity.
Neil Collins was the Daily Telegraph’s City Editor
Vienna and Prague
with Christopher Wentworth-Stanley 7th to 14th May 2026
Christopher Wentworth-Stanley moved to Vienna in the early 1980s and has never looked back. He has led a previous Oldie tour of his adopted city, which was described as ‘unforgettable’, not least because Christopher took people to places they would never have known about –the hallmark of the best Oldie tours.
So, here again, Christopher has plotted an itinerary of his favourite haunts in Vienna, including a winetasting and dinner at the Austrian Jockey Club, a visit to Schloss Ernegg, the delightful home of Georgie Newall, before we head to Prague. Please expect quite a bit of walking. And laughter.
Thursday 7th May – Depart Heathrow at 12.55 on BA flight 724; arrive Vienna Schwechat at 15.45. Transfer to Hotel Wandl, chosen by Christopher mainly for its great location. Welcome drink at 6.30pm; dinner at the charming traditional Viennese restaurant Ofenloch.
Friday 8th May – well-known Vienna
A walking tour of the historic centre of Vienna with CWS, a visit to St Stephen’s Cathedral and the Imperial Library; then walk through the Hofburg to the Heldenplatz. Lunch at Glacis Beisl. Guided tour of the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Austria’s most prestigious art gallery. 7pm performance of the ballet Giselle, at the Staatsoper, music by Adolphe Adam, choreography by Elena Tschernischova; late supper in the private room at Ristorante Sole, famous meeting place of opera singers and musicians.
Above: Karlskirche Church
Right: Charles Bridge
Saturday 9th May – lesserknown sights of Vienna
A walk-through the medieval back streets ending with the Jesuit Church; lunch at Cafe Engländer. After lunch, we visit the Karlskirche and Schwarzenbergplatz, followed by a visit to the Belvedere Gallery (including paintings by Klimt and Schiele). Optional alternative: 3pm performance of Gustav Mahler’s 8th Symphony (‘The Symphony of a Thousand’) in the Konzerthaus, performed by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Andris Nelsons. 6pm wine-tasting followed by dinner at the Austrian Jockey Club.
Schloss Ernegg (30 minutes). Cocktails in the garden, dinner in the Schloss, and stay the night.
Monday 11th May – Český Krumlov and Prague 10am depart for Český Krumlov (two hours). After lunch there, tour of the great castle (UNESCO World Heritage Site). Onward to Prague, where we will stay at the pretty Hotel Rott, next to the Old Town Square. Dinner at U Černého Medvěda.
Tuesday 12th May – Malá Strana (‘Lesser Side’ of the river) Morning visit to Charles Bridge, St Nicholas’s Church, the most splendid Baroque church in Prague. Lunch at Malostranská Beseda. Bus up to Loreto Square and walk to Castle Square. Tour of St Vitus Cathedral, castle and castle gardens. Dinner at U Dvou Velbloudů.
Sunday 10th May – Melk and Schloss Ernegg Check out and depart by coach for the spectacular Benedictine monastery of Melk on the Danube. Lunch at Stiftsrestaurant Melk.
Afternoon tour of monastery, followed by tea in the Pavilion (famous frescoes by Johann Bergl). After tea, leave for
Wednesday 13th May – Staré Město (‘Old Town’) Morning tour of Old Town Square (Tyn Church, Palais Kinsky, Jan Hus monument, town hall and astronomical clock). Bus back to Malá Strana to Lobkowicz Palace; tour, lunch in the palace restaurant, followed by walk down through palace gardens. Dinner at Obecni Dum.
Thursday 14th May – Morning visit to the Klementinum. Depart for Prague Airport to take the 14.05 BA flight 853; arrive Heathrow at 15.10.
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, and all transport. Flights are not included. You need to pay for drinks outside of meals. Single supplement: £300. Deposit £750 per person; balance due 7th November.
Whinchat
by john mcewen illustrated by carry akroyd
‘How the wheat-ear and whin-chat [Saxicola rubetra] support themselves in winter cannot be so easily ascertained, since they spend their time on wild heaths and warrens,’ wrote Gilbert White (1720-93).
Selborne, Hampshire, in the time of this pioneering naturalist – also Selborne’s parson, as his father had been – was all but inaccessible in winter. That can well explain his assumption that the whinchat, a summer migrant from Africa, was a British resident. It’s even more excusable as there have been December sightings.
Gilbert White’s brother John, living in Gibraltar, one of the main pathways of bird migration from Africa to Europe, was his chief informant. But, as he wrote to John, bird migration was ‘a dark and mysterious business’. So it remains, for all the technological aids now available.
The whinchat has been classified of red concern since 2015. Its numbers have halved since 1995. The main reason for this alarming decline is the absence of ‘wild heaths’ and their abundant insects.
Wild country used to be a feature of lowland Britain, but air travel and intensive farming now confine wild land largely to the uplands.
It is symptomatic that two of the densest UK whinchat populations are found today in the military training area of Salisbury Plain and the bracken-filled valleys of the Cheviot Hills on the Anglo-Scottish Border.
August is a prime time to see this least populous (47,000 pairs) of UK chats. The fledging of second broods is then completed and migratory passage is underway. Their main departure is in September.
The whinchat is slighter and less showy than the brighter-plumaged stonechat. The latter shares the same habitat as the other UK chat, the plumper, grey-backed wheatear.
The most eye-catching distinction from the similarly robin-size stonechat is the whinchat’s white stripe above the eye – creamier in the female – together with the white-edged tail.
The chats take their name from their call, like two struck pebbles. The whinchat’s ‘chat’ is more of a ‘tick-tick’, or even an anxious ‘peep’ when a nest is approached. Its song is judged more mellow and varied, with hints of ventriloquism, than the other two chats’. Like the wheatear, it often sings at night.
In this century, ‘molecular phylogenetic’ research has re-classified our chats as flycatchers (Muscicapidae), rather than thrushes (Turdidae). Despite its name, the whinchat nests on the ground and the stonechat nests in whin bushes.
Until 20th September, Gilbert White’s nature diary for 1766 is in a display of
Naturalists’ Notebooks belonging to the Linnean Society, the world’s oldest active biological society. The society is in the courtyard of Burlington House/ Royal Academy, Piccadilly. The display is free.
There are examples on diverse subjects, from anthropology – father of taxonomy Linneas (1707-78) on Lapland – to insects, botany, birds and the present. Included is ornithologist Tim Birkhead’s 1974 study of breeding guillemots on a Skomer cliff.
Charles Darwin is not represented, but his quote on field notebooks is prominent: ‘Let the collector’s motto be “Trust nothing to the memory.”’
Travel
Waterloo’s gatekeepers
The Château d’Hougoumont was shattered in the great victory. Now, 210 years later, its elegant garden is to be restored. By Harry Mount
The outcome of the battle of Waterloo rested upon the closing of the gates at Hougoumont.’
So declared the Duke of Wellington after his victory over Napoleon 210 years ago, on 18th June 1815.
If you stand today on the ridge where Wellington stood, looking over the battlefield sloping down to Napoleon’s front line, you can still make out the Château d’Hougoumont.
From a distance, across the neatly bordered, flowering potato fields, Hougoumont – more grand farmhouse than château – looks spick and span, flanked by the long walls of its kitchen garden. Move closer, though, and you soon make out the deep scars of that momentous day.
The Battle of Waterloo started at Hougoumont at around 11.30am and raged until 8.30 that summer evening. Some 14,000 French soldiers attacked the château and 12,000 Allied troops fought them off. At Hougoumont 5,000 soldiers were killed or wounded.
Wellington called the Waterloo victory ‘the nearest-run thing you ever saw’. And Hougoumont’s gates were the hinge on which that victory turned.
Again and again, the French tried to batter down the gates – recently rebuilt, using timber from the current Duke of Wellington’s Stratfield Saye estate. Forty French soldiers
squeezed in. All were killed, apart from an 11-year-old drummer boy.
The Coldstream Guards and the Scots Guards held the day, even if the château was burnt to the ground, its chapel left as a surviving fragment.
Victor Hugo wrote of the chapel, in Les Misérables (1862),
‘The door was burned; the floor was burned; the wooden Christ was not burned. The fire preyed upon his feet, of which only the blackened stumps are now to be seen. Then it stopped – a miracle, according to
the assertion of the people of the neighbourhood.’
Still today, you can see Christ with his fire-amputated feet, standing guard over the tiny chapel and its altar, piled high with wreaths of poppies.
Hougoumont has become one of the great war memorials of Europe. Everywhere you look around the château and the farm, the battle lives on.
There’s a monument to the Scots Guards outside the hallowed gates (pictured). Inside the gates, on the 200th anniversary, in 2015, the then Prince
Closing the Gates at Hougoumont, 1815 by Robert Gibb
Charles unveiled another monument, showing two Allied soldiers holding back the gates. The memorial was part of a £3m restoration.
On the 210th anniversary this June, a lone Scots Guards piper, Lance Sergeant Douglas Warren, played ‘Highland Laddie’ at the gates, to salute his lost comrades – and Prince Edward.
The prince came to Hougoumont to pay respect to the Allied and French dead – and make a symbolic start to the garden project by planting a seed of a ‘tree of peace’, a descendant of a sapling salvaged from the ruins of Hiroshima in 1945.
A splendid obelisk to the French dead at Hougoumont stands in the middle of the château garden. Look closely at the garden walls and you’ll see the loopholes hacked into the brick, to fire grapeshot and cannonballs at the oncoming French.
After the battle, Victor Hugo said of Hougoumont, ‘It was a château; it is no longer anything but a farm.’
For nearly 200 years, Hougoumont remained a farm, frozen in time, its ruined manor and agricultural buildings left in their shattered state. It was in private ownership until 2003, when it became the property of the Intercommunale, a consortium of local authorities.
The charity Project Hougoumont has preserved the chapel and the farm buildings, adding a museum and a gripping son et lumière – fair to both sides – about the battle.
Now Hougoumont’s formal garden, vegetable garden and three orchards, obliterated by the battle, will be restored.
Victor Hugo wrote, ‘It was a seignorial garden in the first French style which preceded André Le Nôtre [1613-1700; Louis XIV’s main architect and landscape designer]; today it is ruins and briars.’
The new garden will echo that formal French look. Today’s lawn will become an elevated ornamental parterre, bordered by a balustrade.
The old kitchen vegetable garden will be revived with 18th-century planting techniques. The big orchard, where the worst of the fighting took place, will be replanted in its original symmetrical layout. And a new biosphere garden, for schools and families, will rise on wetland, just beyond the famous north gates.
The Friends of the Hougoumont Gardens and the Waterloo Committee are running the project, designed by François Goffinet, a distinguished Belgian garden designer. Some £950,000 of the £1.3m total cost has been raised.
Baron Alexander de Vos van Steenwijk, Chairman of the Friends of the Hougoumont Gardens, said, ‘We know
how the gardens looked before the battle because there were many depictions of Hougoumont from the time.
‘We’ve also worked with archaeologists who have carried out research which shows how and where the trees were planted in the orchard.’
Backed by the local Walloon Region and the Kléber Rossillon Group, which looks after the battlefield, the gardens will open in 2027. They will be an extra lure for visitors to Waterloo.
Getting there is easy. The battlefield is only 20 miles from the Brussels Eurostar station – a 40-minute drive.
Waterloo is easy to navigate. The ridge where Wellington surveyed the battlefield is prominent, marked by the Lion’s Mound, the huge pyramid of earth piled up in honour of King William II of the Netherlands, wounded by a musket ball. Waterloo was still part of the Netherlands in 1815.
So little has changed that the navigation points today are Wellington’s and Napoleon’s navigation points – the few buildings scattered across the plain. The tourist shops and restaurants are discreetly hidden from the battlefield.
It was crucial that Wellington was up on the ridge, his troops concealed by the tall rye grass.
Napoleon had to struggle up the hill, through the mud, after a rainy night. He joined battle late in the morning, in the vain hope that the summer warmth would dry the ground.
Down to the right is Hougoumont. Straight ahead is La Haye Sainte, the walled farmhouse on the BrusselsCharleoi road. Here 400 King’s German Legion troops kept Napoleon at bay till the late afternoon.
Beyond La Haye Sainte is La Belle Alliance – then an inn; now a nightclub. Here, at 9pm on the evening of the battle, Wellington met Prince Blücher,
the 74-year-old Prussian general who swept into Waterloo in the late afternoon, guaranteeing Wellington his victory. By this time, Napoleon had fled the battlefield for Paris, where on 24th June he announced his abdication.
Lt-Col Basil Jackson watched the meeting between Wellington and Blücher:
‘The two great chiefs cordially shook hands, and were together about ten minutes; it was then so dark that I could not distinguish Blücher’s features. On leaving Blücher, the Duke rode at a walk towards Waterloo.’
You can visit the Wellington Museum in the pretty little town of Waterloo –here Wellington spent the night before and the night after the battle. Here, too, he wrote the Wellington Dispatch to Lord Bathurst, Secretary of State for War, early in the morning after the battle.
In the dispatch, he wrote:
‘I am happy to add that [Hougoumont] was maintained throughout the day with the utmost gallantry by these brave troops, notwithstanding the repeated efforts of large bodies of the enemy to obtain possession of it.’
Stroll down from Wellington’s ridge down to Hougoumont – and the whole story of the battle clicks into sharp focus.
As Victor Hugo said, ‘Hougoumont was a funereal spot; the beginning of the obstacle; the first resistance, which that great wood-cutter of Europe, called
Napoleon, encountered at Waterloo; the first knot under the blows of his axe.’
Eurostar, London to Brussels return, from £88 (www.eurostar.com)
Harry Mount stayed in Martin’s Hotel, Louvain-la-Neuve, doubles from £95 (www.martinshotels.com)
For more information and to donate, go to www.gardensofhougoumont.com
Scots Guards: Prince Edward and Lance Sgt Warren (far right), Hougoumont, 2025
Hougoumont before Waterloo
Overlooked Britain
Manchester’s palace of culture
The John Rylands Library is a Gothic marvel, crammed with the rarest volumes and illuminated manuscripts
lucinda lambton
The John Rylands Research Institute and Library stands proud in Deansgate in the middle of Manchester – an intoxicatingly beautiful building.
It was designed in 1899 by Basil Champneys for the poetically named Enriqueta Augustina Rylands as a memorial to her husband the great philanthropist John Rylands. The Gothic ecclesiastical style was to a large extent due to its having originally been conceived as a theological library.
What a jewel! What a gem for the people of Manchester! It is as glorious a place as exists anywhere in the land!
When Rylands (1801-88) died, he had become one of Manchester’s most successful industrialists, with a personal fortune of some £2.75 million. Ryland was the largest textile manufacturer in Manchester, with 4,500 employees.
The library was a fine mark of his success, housed in such a very great and magnificent building. Its grandeur took ten years to create before the Rylands Library opened for readers on 1st January 1900.
Now part of Manchester University, it was founded to develop and enhance access to scholarship. It has an especially important collection of books.
Dwell for a moment on the oldest extant New Testament text, the 2ndcentury-AD St John’s fragment. Then there is the 1476 William Caxton edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
Such rare delights are here in abundance. Let us not forget the wealth of the 6,000 illuminated medieval manuscripts, bought from James Lindsay, 26th Earl of Crawford.
Worth mentioning too are the writer Elizabeth Gaskell’s letters and personal papers, present in great number.
In 1892, Mrs Rylands bought the 2nd
Left: the John Rylands Research Institute and Library. Below: statue of John Rylands in the Reading Room
from above: the reading room; marble staircase; the Old Library Reading Room
Earl Spencer’s famed collection of 43,000 books, including many notable Bibles, costing her £210,000. This included a Gutenberg Bible, the Mainz Psalter and 53 Caxtons. Spencer’s library was considered the finest library in private ownership in the world.
In my book, the finest feature of the place is its great Gothic reading room, where you find a full-length, life-size statue of Mrs Rylands by Manchester sculptor John Cassidy.
Commissioned by supporters of the library, the statue was unveiled on 9th December 1907, a few months before
her death. She faces the statue of her husband down the full and fine length of the reading room.
By the way, this startlingly beautiful building, with one of the best collections of books in the world, is free to visit. It’s regularly relished and used by the people of Manchester.
Words cannot adequately describe the extent of the wonder that sweeps over you the minute you first step inside the library’s doors, which have graced this splendid building for 125 years.
Its exterior has the startling richness of dark red Barbary sandstone, smothered with as elaborate a wealth of intricate carvings as can be imagined.
There are gargoyles and spires galore, as well as an abundance of stained glass creating a kaleidoscope of colours. Two galleried floors of solid yet intricate Gothic beauty have the richest finery of carving.
Two enormous stained-glass windows display portraits of religious and secular figures, designed by the great C E Kempe.
The western window shows ‘Theology’ from Moses to Schleiermacher, while the eastern window shows ‘Literature and Art’, including philosophy. So it goes on, giving us superb delight at every turn.
And there are statues galore ‘of the intellectual and artistic history of mankind’. All in all, it is a quite glorious jumble and a half. And, although in its earliest stages, newfangled electricity was chosen over gas to light all this splendour.
Where else does such magnificence exist and in such huge doses? There can surely be no finer library in the land than the Rylands.
Clockwise
On the Road
This charming man
Nigel
Havers on Chariots of Fire, The Charmer and playing his grandfather, the judge in the Ruth Ellis trial. By Louise Flind
Anything you can’t leave home without? My wife.
Is there something you really miss?
I’ve toured all my career, and I miss everything about being at home.
Do you travel light?
I travel light and my wife travels heavy. I once made a mistake of criticising how much luggage there was, and I’ll never make that mistake again. ‘Don’t you understand – I’m a woman…’ I like to take nothing, buy a couple of T-shirts, a shirt and a pair of jeans and when I leave, give them to charity.
Your earliest childhood holiday memories? Harry Carr, a jockey who lived near us in Suffolk, told my father [Michael Havers, the Lord Chancellor] that his horse, Parthia, would win the Derby. Dad bet, and it won, and we leapt into the family Jaguar and drove to Italy. I was six, and just about to go to boarding school.
Did you act at school?
I did. Every summer at my prep school, we did a Shakespeare play in the grounds, a perfect setting for a play. I ended up in a grown-up production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, playing Puck.
Do you wish you were a barrister, like lots of your relations?
I’m far too emotional. I would stand up and scream at the judge and behave badly if I felt passionate about something.
Did you always want to become an actor? I did. There’s always a risk you might fall on your arse and never make a bean, but I, for some reason, stuck at it. When I wasn’t working as an actor, I worked in a wine shop and as a researcher for The Jimmy Young Show on the radio.
Might you have become a bass guitarist? I wasn’t really good enough. I copied all the other bass guitars, and really loved it. I don’t know that you can make a living being a bass guitarist, if you’re not Paul McCartney.
You starred in The Charmer. What defines real charm and fake charm?
I don’t know about fake charm –either charm is in you or it isn’t.
What was the Arts Educational School like?
I was supposed to go to Slough Grammar, otherwise known as Eton, but I really didn’t want to go there, so I told my dad how much the drama school would cost and how much Eton was going to cost…
I didn’t prepare at all. I just have fun. I know about antiques. My wife won’t let me go into antique shops any more because I say, ‘I don’t think this is 17th-century. I think it was made a month ago.’
Do you prefer theatre to TV and film?
When I’m doing a play, I always wish I was doing a film. And when I’m filming, I’d love to be in a theatre.
What was your first big break? Nicholas Nickleby at the BBC.
Where was Chariots of Fire filmed? Edinburgh, Liverpool, Cambridge, Kent, Newcastle, York and London. The beach was in St Andrews.
Did you actually film the hurdles scene? Did you spill any champagne? We trained for four and a half months with an Olympic coach (unpaid). I did spill some champagne, not because I touched the hurdles but because, as I went over them, the wind moved the glasses. So we sellotaped them down.
What was it like playing your grandfather, Sir Cecil Havers, the judge, in A Cruel Love: The Ruth Ellis Story? It was great. They asked whether I wanted to do it and I said I’d rather I do it than have anyone else do it. I did say that I was worried I might be a bit too young. They said, actually, you’re 15 years older than your grandfather was…
Is there a role you’d love to play? Hamlet, which would be a problem now I’m 73. Mind you, Ian McKellen did it at 82.
How did you prepare for The Bidding Room, the auction-house reality show?
Do you still have Mick Jagger’s suit? [Nigel’s father represented Mick in court and they celebrated at the Haverses’ house. Mick changed into a caftan in Nigel’s bedroom.) I wish I’d kept it. I’d have framed it somehow…
Where did you go on your honeymoon? Hang on. Let me ask my wife. She can’t remember [he laughs]. She says living with me is one big honeymoon.
What’s your favourite destination?
In the south of France, a little hotel called La Colombe d’Or in Saint-Paul-de-Vence.
What’s your biggest travel headache?
I just hate the airport. Travelling on British Airways to Nice recently, I thought, ‘F**k it, we’ll go club class because people don’t say, ‘Can I have a photo?’
At Gatwick, the steward says, ‘I’m really embarrassed but we’ve got absolutely no catering.’ A week later, on the way back, they had no catering again. So I emailed British Airways and got an automatic reply saying it will take 28 days to reply, and they’ve never responded. The stewards are really nice, though.
The Bidding Room is available on BBC iPlayer
Taking a Walk
Honey still for tea in Grantchester
patrick barkham
Many memorable walks begin in adversity.
If braving Cambridge Railway Station does not sound like the start of a hero’s journey, you haven’t been there lately. Show me a more dismal and overcrowded station in Britain.
On an ordinary Friday morning, there were a dozen unfortunates queuing to use the women’s toilets. I hope they weren’t as bad as the men’s, which stank.
For me, a rare stroll in Cambridge is usually overwhelmed by heady fumes of nostalgia. The students somehow look unchanged from my day. But today I turned away from the memory places and the crowds and headed west down leafy Brooklands Avenue. It was populated by Victorian villas so vast they housed organisations encapsulating multiple civilisations, such as the Ancient India and Iran Trust.
Wrens were song-duelling – impossibly raucous for such tiny birds – as I crossed parkland and reached the water meadows that are the beautiful green heart of Cambridge. Cows grazed and another memory burst through: all those years ago, one of my new student friends from London had been freaked out by such enormous beasts in the middle of a city.
The fluff from riverside willows drifted through the air like snow on a warm summer breeze. The river was the same colour as the willows – a cloudy green, not a healthy pallor.
I turned south at Paradise, a local nature reserve which was populated by Cetti’s warblers calling loudly from the shrubbery and orange tip butterflies sailing over it. It was impossible to imagine we were in a crowded city at all.
Newnham village was delightful: tight Victorian terraces once full of dons and now affordable only for biotech millionaires. I crunched along a novel gravel pavement in this magical enclave.
The footpath continued beside Skaters’ Meadow, which was interrupted by a small lamppost in its midst. The meadow was illuminated and flooded every winter between 1920 and 1940, when the water would reliably ice up for skating. An evening’s skating cost 6d.
The valley opened out at Grantchester Meadows, adorned by yellow marsh marigold and old pollarded willows.
When I was a student, I somehow never walked or punted here. How could I not? I berated myself. I might be righting this historic wrong 30 years on, but I still rather wished I had first seen it with my romantic 20-year-old eyes.
A sedge warbler sang, skittishly. Picnicking students were laughing by the water and I remembered something else: I first got drunk by a river. My youth wasn’t completely wasted.
A rope hung from an ash on the bend of the river – a good swim spot. And then suddenly from the flatlands rose a dinky river cliff beside the village of Grantchester.
In the late 1990s, when I was an undergraduate, Roger Deakin returned here and wrote about it in Waterlog. He was looking back to his student days 30 years earlier. He swam the big mill pool, remembering a dozen friends punting there at dusk and swimming in the pool, on and on into the night. Now the pool
was deserted. Sorry, Rog – I was too busy studying. He swam it once, like a ritual dance, joined by absent long-lost friends.
It was a moving scene, filled with sadness about that unreachable foreign country that is the past. There were plenty of ghosts here: Rupert Brooke, Virginia Woolf and Byron all swam these waters.
But there was also a compelling present. In 2055, someone else will return here to gaze back on their student days, when the freshly-cut grass of the cricket oval filled the air and Teslas filled the Orchard Tea Garden car park.
And there was summer shade and people having a lovely time with large wedges of cake at the climax of one of the most gorgeous city strolls you could ever take.
Cross to the west bank of the Cam at the footbridge at Newnham, follow the footpath south through Paradise nature reserve and take the riverside path to Grantchester, with the Orchard Tea Garden providing a refuelling station
Across
1 Revolutionary hairstyle that may be held in a net? (3,6)
6 Joint effort left British out without their leaders (5)
9 Had that hurt study after rejection (5)
10 Review that happens after April Fool’s day? (9)
11 Dictator, being without regulars, runs into trouble (3,7)
12 Split career (4)
14 Note onset of doubt after project is grounded (7)
15 What might give flavour to duck with orange, possibly (7)
17 Cigar found by champion in bed (7)
19 Tend to be cooking in beer – like this? (2,5)
20 Taste defeat (4)
22 Spinner’s badly cut finger needs drug (10)
25 Orange (grey in France) perfume ingredient (9)
26 Lizard and parrot caught after midnight (5)
27 Criticise credit record (5)
28 Useful chap I’d found during island skirmish (3,6)
Down
Genius crossword 455 EL SERENO
1 Figure house doctor should support Republican (5)
2 Run down origin of iconic jar under study (9)
3 Got up after reporting to Roger (10)
4 Restricted cover protecting small child (7)
5 Decode protocol, holding up weapon (7)
6 Part of speech overheard and repeated? (4)
7 Support service underpinning Britain (5)
8 Drink befuddled love rat (5,4)
13 Double late call – I’m not sure (4,6)
14 Churches needing a surplice specially designed (9)
16 Gave notice, seeing girl attacked, losing top (9)
How to enter Please scan or otherwise copy this page and email it to comps@theoldie.co.uk Deadline: 22nd August 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.
Runners-up: Nicholas Grogan, Purley, Surrey; Ray Foxell, Lapford, Devon
In the Crimean War, it is alleged, there was a particular coffee house in Istanbul where British soldiers liked to play their own invented card game. They had to cross a particular bridge (the Galata Bridge) to get to their favoured café, and they called their card game … yes, you’ve guessed it … bridge.
Or so the story goes.Bridge culture remains strong in Turkey to this day. Turkish players tend to bid a lot and they play the cards like an Anatolian leopard, cunning and accurate.
Take Isin Kandemir on this month’s deal from the Turkish Mixed Championships, kindly shown to me by Erdal Sidar via the IBPA Bulletin.
Dealer South Both Vunerable
The bidding South West North East
1 ♥ Pass 2 ♣ Pass
2 ♦ Pass 4NT (1) Pass
5 ♥ (2) Pass 6
(1) Roman Key Card Blackwood, agreeing the last-bid diamonds.
(2) Two of ‘five Aces’ (♦K would have counted); but no ♦ Q.
Declarer won West’s ten-of-spades lead with dummy’s ace, wisely spurning the finesse. He cashed the ace-king of diamonds and observed West discard – at least it was East with the ♦Q 10 9 3, he will have reflected. However, care – as well as fortune – was still required.
At trick four, declarer crossed to the ace of clubs and returned to the kingqueen, shedding his remaining spade as the 3-3 split was revealed. What now?
It is tempting to lead winning clubs through East, but to do so would have been fatal, for East would have discarded hearts. Making no mistake, declarer crossed to the ace-king of hearts and ruffed a heart (he needed East to have three). Only then did he lead winning clubs through East, leaving him with no winning answer. I think it’s time for a coffee.
ANDREW ROBSON
Competition TESSA CASTRO
IN COMPETITION No 321 you were invited to write a poem called Countdown ‘Man’s countdown to extinction has begun,’ wrote Sue Smalley. This was a popular theme, rivalled only by the countdown towards death that we all experience. But Vivien Brown wrote about appearing on television on Countdown and not doing well, concluding unconvincingly, ‘Alas, I’m just not very bright.’
Veronica Colin’s countdown was to the day that the children flown from home would return to the nest. David Dixon gave an account of the countdown to a bungled attempt to ask a girl out to a concert. Among other surprises were D F Bailey’s imagining Cassandra’s countdown to the fall of Troy and Basil Ransome-Davies’s countdown to the perfect boiled egg. Commiserations to them and to Hilary Kirkland, D A Prince, Stefan Badham, Christine Ractliff, Ann Hilton, Tony Wright, Jim C Wilson, Bill Ross and Peter Irwin-Clark, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to Elizabeth Duff, who split the title word into Count Down
Then Van Helsing called to Mr Harker, ‘There in the dark sky – dear God, what is that
With the appearance of a monstrous bat? ’Tis him! Be quick – do you have your barker?’
‘I’ve my pistol – but no silver bullet! Do we not need that to kill the creature?’
Van Helsing laughed, ‘I don’t need a teacher,’
And drew a shining object from his wallet. Harker loaded; aimed; hit the hideous thing.
The Dutchman had at hand the stake and hammer:
He struck. The curtain fell upon this drama.
‘No more,’ he said, ‘will evil foul take wing. We have succeeded; in particular We’ve rid the world of vile Count Dracula!’
Elizabeth Duff
Countdown begins with chilly glimpse of dawn.
On instant I’m awake, I stretch, I’m ready.
Next, my best friend emerges, yawns, Pads to the bathroom, washes, Dresses, and then... Come ON! Door opens, snout pokes out –Oh, the breeze of morning, Fresh, exotic, scented!
There’s the dewy meadow, Cobweb-strung and sparkling; Let me rush in, hotfoot, Wild-eyed, with flying ears –Lead clicks off, And I run Free!
Erika Fairhead
I dreamt I was a child again, My patient mother waiting, arm outstretched
And offering her open hand –Which I ignore, reluctant to be fetched. ‘I’ll count to three…’ She’ll calmly wait. I turn my sullen back, show I don’t care. Yet secretly I start to hesitate. Perhaps this time I won’t come. Would I dare?
Then ‘One…’ How it always begins, When lingering in the toyshop-windowed street.
Then ‘Two…’ The game one of us wins –It’s never me, yet I always compete. When I awoke, my senses all at sea, My bedside phone was quietly glimmering ‘3:00’.
Con Connell
I feel a rush as I ascend, Gathering speed, yet can’t pretend To be at ease when I consider A thought that makes my ticker flitter: That each component of this rocket, From booster to the smallest socket, Was furnished by the lowest bidder.
Martin Elster
COMPETITION No
323 The autumn term always gave me a strange feeling. You are invited to write a poem called Back to School, 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 323’, by Thursday 21st August.
‘He probably is in – he’s just quite slow to answer sometimes’
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Let them eat fish fingers
QWhen my four-year-old grandson comes to visit, I’m upset to find he’s terribly fussy with his food. With me, he refuses to eat anything except spaghetti and tomato sauce. When I offer him, say, beans and potatoes, he refuses. His mother says he’ll eat fried eggs at home, and odd bits of fruit, but I’m afraid he’ll grow up to be faddy – and I can’t believe this diet is doing him any good. Elaine, by email
ADon’t worry – I refused to eat broccoli or fried bacon fat when young and now I eat everything; even raw eggs! I remember a friend of my son’s coming to tea when he was eight and his mother told me he liked his fish fingers peeled. Dutifully following the rules, I peeled his fish – but it turned out he’d eat only the crumb coating, not the fish! Children’s taste buds are very sensitive – not like our hoary, gnarled old things. So kids taste food more acutely. And all will change when he gets to school. Food will taste just as revolting to him, poor chap, as it does to everyone else, but he’ll soon learn to choke it down in the mêlée!
Top gardener wanted
QMy gardener of ten years has moved, and I’ve tried nearly all the others in the area. The problem is that I’m a plantswoman and have very high standards. Despite my small garden often being open to the public and receiving awards and prizes over the years, I can’t afford RHS standards for a gardener. I’m too arthritic to do it myself. So I’ve had to endure quite a bit of ‘slash and burn’ from slapdash young ‘gardeners’ recently, just to keep the weeds at bay. Any ideas?
M B, Cornwall
Ask Virginia
virginia ironside
AIf you’re a gardener, you should be serene and happy to commune with plants, whatever the weather. But in my experience gardeners are the most neurotic people I know. Just think of Lord Emsworth’s head gardener, Angus McAllister – touchy, angry and always ready to resign if thwarted.
Professional gardeners can be tricky –and expensive. Reframe your request. Put an ad in the local paper or WhatsApp group, worded something like this:
‘Wanted: young person interested in gardening. I’m an elderly lady with years of gardening experience that I’d like to pass on. I’ll pay the minimum wage and at the same time instruct a suitable applicant to becoming a highly skilled gardener in my garden in the hope we can form a good working relationship.’
Daughter-in-law at war
QMy son’s wife is divorcing him. She alleges he was abusive, but we think that is just so she can limit his contact with the children. We’ve never got on well with her – in fact, we think she is controlling. What is heartbreaking for us is that we’re not getting to see our grandchildren at all.
They are six and four, and we worry their mother is turning their minds against their dad and us, too. If he does get to see the children, it’s so rushed he hasn’t time to bring them to see us. Surely it’s damaging for children not to be able to see their grandparents.
M P, Carlisle
ASadly, there is no automatic legal right for grandparents to see their grandchildren. They can apply for a Child Arrangement Order but it’s better for everyone involved, especially the children, if the adults can negotiate
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fair arrangements calmly. Bad feeling in this case clearly goes back quite a way; talk it all over with the Family Lives Helpline (0808 800 2222). They can help you work out how to approach your daughter-in-law, and how to guide your son through the split too, to achieve the best outcome for your grandchildren.
The drugs do work
Peter Brown, a long-time sufferer from depression, emailed about the elderly reader who had recently been advised to give up antidepressants after years of taking them. Many doctors think that long-standing depression is due to a missing ingredient in the brain, and that sufferers, he says, ‘need to be constantly supplied with the correct medication.The thought of weaning someone in their 80s off their tablets is absurd; maintaining their quality of life is more important.
‘The remedy is to contact the telephone service NHS Direct and tell your story. They have the power to override your doctor and even to place an order with your usual pharmacy on your behalf. Remember you have the right to a second opinion with the NHS. So you can ask to be dealt with by another doctor. Contact your practice admin section and explain. Hope this helps.’
I agree. Surely a good doctor would prescribe relief from misery over unhappy longevity (with the patient’s consent, of course).
As Kingsley Amis said, when advised – at a ripe old age – to give up drink, ‘No pleasure is worth giving up for the sake of two more years in an expensive geriatric home at Weston-super-Mare.’
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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