December Oldie), but she unaccountably made a mistake in thinking that a website comment that I quoted in passing applied to a hotel. ‘The situation is good and the rooms are in order,’ it said. ‘I went with a dark, podgy Romanian girl. I wouldn’t recommend it.’ That was a user comment on the Club Los Rosales, off the A92N. It is a brothel, not a hotel. These joyless places are quite legal in Spain, but please don’t expect overnight accommodation. Christopher Howse, London SW1
FAT T Y PU FFS
Joyce’s voice
SIR: If Jeremy Lewis is going to criticise Joyce DiDonato’s singing at the Last Night of the Proms (Living Hell, December Oldie), he should not display his ignorance by saying that it comprised ‘trills and swoops’ when she sang ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’. There was not a trill in sight – I heard it live on the BBC and have listened to it since on YouTube – and as for the swoops, she never swooped once. Mr Lewis obviously doesn’t know the difference between a swoop and a portamento, which is musically totally acceptable, even if not as fashionable as it was, whether it be opera or ‘popular’ singing, as he calls it. I do agree that most opera singers don’t do a good job with such songs – like Joyce, another exception to this is Barbara Hendricks – but knowing that Joyce sang that song from the heart, as it was the last song she sang to her beloved father before he died, I doubt very much that she felt ‘pleased with herself’ as he so nastily puts it. This is one of the really great singers of the day – don’t do her down where she doesn’t deserve it. Diana Grayland, Madrid, Spain
Forever greedy?
SIR: I chortled at the bit in ‘Forever Young’ (December Oldie) where Mr Parsons says, ‘I enjoyed every job I had. The money became secondary.’ When he came to the Ledbury Poetry Festival a year or two back he kept on whingeing about his fee. Peter Wyton, via email
A vicar writes
SIR: Wilfred De’Ath, in his piece about Existentialism (November Oldie), asserts ‘Camus always maintained that one had the right to commit suicide if one found life absurd’. Camus did no such thing. His book, The Myth of Sisyphus, opens
with the words, ‘There is only one truly serious philosophical problem: suicide’, by which he means whether life is worth living, whether it has any meaning. Camus goes on to expound his belief that life is ‘absurd’, and it is absurd, not because it is meaningless, but because in fact we experience it as both meaningful and meaningless. The only honest (authentic) response to this is to live within the tension between the two. Hence the titles of two earlier essays, ‘Entre Oui et Non’, and ‘L’Envers et L’Endroit’. Camus concludes that suicide is not a valid option because it ‘eludes the absurd’: i.e. it denies one side of the meaningful/meaningless paradox. (Rev) Alan Robson, Trimingham, Norfolk
Lighting-up time
Fiona fans’ fury
Cold lands, warm heart
SIR: Ever since we first came across a copy of The Oldie (at the dentist’s) we have been regular subscribers, but we were so enraged by Richard Ingrams’s TV column in the November issue, in which he made such derogatory remarks about that excellent and charming presenter Fiona Bruce, that my husband declared he was no longer going to subscribe to ‘that rag’. How sad is that? M Davies, Twickenham
One satisfied customer
SIR: ‘Favourite Magazine’ The postman brings me The Oldie I like it very much And now that I am eighty-five It helps me stay in touch. The cartoons make me laugh Some articles make me cry I hope it keeps on coming Until the day I die. Rex Moreton, Newport
SIR: I was saddened to see James Le Fanu crediting Thomas Edison with the invention of the light bulb (November issue). Joseph Swan (1828–1914) experimented for many years from the 1850s to perfect a filament in a glass bulb made incandescent by electricity. His first public demonstration was in December 1878 and he patented it in 1880, a year before Edison’s US patent. His house in Gateshead was the first in the world to be lit by lightbulbs, and the world’s first electric light illumination in a public building was for a lecture Swan gave in 1880. Paul Clark, Battle, Sussex PS I won’t be cancelling my subscription. SIR: David Wright’s letter (November issue) about the statue in Iceland commemorating Arctic Convoy PQ7 reminds me of another little-known statue in a remote region of Norway; it too is dedicated to failure. I was visiting a village on the railway line from Oslo to Bergen. At the highest point on the journey there is a small station called Hardanger, which takes its name from the glacier which descends from that point. In a clearing in the snow in the middle of the small square outside the railway station my attention was drawn to a life-sized statue of a man clad as if on an arctic exploration. Its bronze plaque identified the man as Robert Falcon Scott, and explained that he and his team spent the winter before their disastrous journey to the South Pole training on the Hardanger Glacier. Scott and his team arrived at the Pole only to discover that Amundsen – a Norwegian – had beaten them there
☞ continues over the page January 2014 – THE OLDIE
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