Indholdsfortegnelse for May 2024 i The Oldie

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary I know I have come a bit late to the party – I have only just begun to discover the joys of mindfulness. To be honest, I wasn’t quite sure what the word meant until my physiotherapist, Finola, 34, explained it to me. Mindfulness means living in the present moment. More than that, it means being deliberately more aware and awake to each moment and being fully engaged in what is happening in one’s surroundings – with acceptance and without judgement. Sounds a bit fey, I agree, but there’s something in it. These days, I am literally smelling the roses. Finola has me starting my day with a walk around the garden, sensing the dew, sniffing the flowers, listening to the birdsong (carefully, so I can tell…

WHAT IS a Swedish death clean? Döstädning, literally death clean in Swedish, means reducing your possessions to save your loved ones a huge task when you’re gone. Decluttering, then? Yeh, but no, but… A lovely lady called Margareta Magnusson makes it more of a philosophy in her warm-hearted book The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning. Sorting your stuff becomes a feelgood way of life that she advocates starting in your 50s – she is aged between 80 and 100, she says. She speaks from sad experience, having cleared out the homes of friends and relatives, as well as downsizing from house to flat after her husband’s death. If you pre-empt the worst by organising and clearing some of the crap, life will become more manageable. The process can be…

Did you know that queen bees can suddenly start laying eggs that make drones instead of worker bees? So instead of a colony of industrious females busily making honey to feed the hive, you have nothing but useless drones. All the bees starve to death. That was our first lesson in organic farming. Then, full of self-righteous zeal, we planted an apple orchard with trees in danger of extinction because no one plants them any more. Now I know why. No one in their right mind would plant trees bearing fruit too small to peel, scabby (no pesticides allowed), misshapen and too sour to eat. Good only for apple jelly. And how much of that can you foist on your friends? Next, a wildflower meadow. Easy. You just chuck the…

Town Mouse Every week brings another story of the decline of merrymaking and culture in Britain. According to the beautifully named Night-Time Industries Association, over 2,679 clubs and bars closed between March 2020 and December 2023. More than a thousand of those were in London, where this mouse has his nest. One potential casualty is my own local gig venue, Bush Hall, at the end of my road in west London. Following a precipitous decline in business, the owners were recently forced to raise £42,000 via crowdfunding for bank loans and repairs. It’s not just night-time culture that’s suffering. A depressingly large number of crowdfunding emails for all sorts of brilliant institutions arrive in my inbox. There’s the excellent Marx Memorial Library on Clerkenwell Green. Housed in a Grade II-listed…

Postcards from the Edge I’m too much of a Catholic convent girl to be persuaded by the arguments favouring euthanasia – now called ‘assisted dying’. But if I were to be tempted by the campaign advanced so successfully by Esther Rantzen, the point that might lure me is money. Before you go on holiday, it seems sensible to revise your will, in case you snuff it on some foreign shore. I duly revised mine recently. It occurred to me that the longer we live, the more likely we are to use up the little pot of deposits that might have gone to our heirs and successors. That’s unless we have been prudent and planned properly for the last years of life – a description that doesn’t fit those of us…

Paul Flather, Fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford, laid on a fine memorial service for his mother, Shreela Flather, the first Asian woman to become a member of the House of Lords, at Easthampstead Park, near Bracknell, Berkshire. Among the distinguished speakers were Sir Michael Palin, who read from Gitanjali by Rabindranath Tagore, and Sir Ben Okri, who read an extract from his poem Mental Flight. Sir Trevor Phillips and Lord Bilimoria spoke. Theresa May paid tribute to Lady Flather, Mayor of Windsor and Maidenhead – where she got on like a house on fire with Prince Philip. She once joked that he and the Queen should pay rates to help with the borough’s budget problems. Her obit in the Times reported that when she joined the Lords in 1990, the…

April 1979 was wet. The week leading up to Easter was especially dismal. I had been in Berry Brothers, the wine shop, for just over a year, building up a group of regular customers: people living in London with a love of wine, who would drop on a weekly basis. Valerie Eliot, TS Eliot’s widow, was one of my favourites. Every Tuesday, she would appear to collect her regular bottle of Berrys’ London Dry Gin. The first time I looked after her, I asked for her name. ‘Mrs TS Eliot,’ she said, very deliberately, as I wrote it down in my notebook. She was impressed that I spelt the surname correctly – not too many ls or ts. I hoped she thought this was entirely due to my extensive knowledge…

SOPHIA WAUGH Reading Lessons By Carol Atherton Fig Tree £18.99 Carol Atherton is an English teacher working in a boys’ grammar school, which accepts girls in the sixth form. She has written a thoughtful book about the texts chosen to be read in schools and the reasons they are chosen. She cleverly links each book or play with issues the students might be facing in their daily lives, as they face forward into the world outside education. ‘This book has been, in part, a love letter to English teaching,’ she writes in her afterword, and it is indeed as much about teaching as about the texts taught. It is a hymn to English literature, the dedication of English teachers, her pupils and even, by extension, all pupils. She is saying…

Dining rooms We were invited to a kitchen supper the other night. It’s an outdated phrase – where else do you entertain these days? The occupants of every single household near us in London have smashed down walls to create an open-plan eat-in kitchen with a vast island. It’s called modern living: you want to cook, eat and relax in the same space – which is all very well until you have guests over and you have no choice but to perform in front of them as if you’re on a cooking show. Then you have to dine in a war zone of splattered recipe books and washing-up. I find it all a bit much. When our own version of the kitchen-living-dining space arrived last year, my husband and five…

Our tennis club asks members to refrain from foul language on court – ‘even if, as is almost always the case, it is directed at yourself’. I appreciate that amused, schoolmasterly rebuke. No such humorous attitude was ever detected in the foul-mouthed WhatsApp messages that flew about Number 10 in Covid days, as revealed in the inquiry. The dislikeable Dominic Cummings had to be told, ‘We are going to have to coarsen our language somewhat, Mr Cummings, in order to hear the evidence.’ This insight into how we are governed by lazy, humourless WhatsAppers came in Helen Lewis Has Left the Chat (Radio 4). The New Statesman journalist has been online since her schooldays; she can now look back and make fun of its hellishness. Oh, how glad I am…

Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me) was back on the radio a few weeks ago. I fell through a wormhole in time and found myself in 1975 when it was part of the glorious soundtrack of college life. We dialled it up non-stop on our pub jukebox, assuming it was an optimistic love song written after a rough patch – an impression backed by its brisk, freewheeling pace and almost jaunty, gut-stringed guitar solo. It seemed to belong beneath cloudless skies playing in cafés in the Algarve. But, as I found out later, this masked its dark heart and dour, rather Gothic inception – one of those fascinating tracks that would never have been on the radio in the first place without a magical transformation in the studio.…

The Tradescants, father and son, travelled widely in central America in the 17th century. They brought back, among many other plants, a scarlet-flowering climber which was initially grown for decoration. Then someone discovered that the long pods growing from the plants and replacing the flowers were delicious to eat. And so began people’s long-lasting affair with England’s favourite bean. I have never come across runner beans elsewhere in Europe, which is not so surprising; other countries do not recognise them in their own languages. Haricots verts are what we call French beans, whereas runner beans are translated by the French as haricots d’Espagne. The only possible link between runners and ‘Spanish’ beans is their origin in what was Spanish Mexico. The term haricots d’Espagne in fact refers to climbing French…

My Scottish friend Paul, with whom I regularly watch rugby and partake of more single-malt Scotch than perhaps is wise, doesn't exactly defy the perfidious Sassenachs’ stereotyping of his countryfolk. He has a keen eye for a bargain. He recently alerted me to a special offer at Waitrose: Glen Scotia Campbeltown Harbour single malt, ‘a lovely dram, and a steal at £25’. He was right: it’s delicious. Honeyed but not sweet, with a gentle waft of peat, it would have been decent value even at the regular price of £38.50. Three of Scotland’s five whisky regions are well known. The Highlands region encompasses a huge geographical area (including many of the islands) and an equally vast range of styles, from the island whiskies of Jura, Talisker and Highland Park to…

This is a bumper year for elections. The electoral stars have aligned so that there will be well over 60 national elections in 2024. About half the world’s population will be able to have some sort of say in who governs them this year. That’s a lot of votes, and Google is in the thick of it. I hope they get it right. I’ve written here before about why electronic voting, especially internetbased voting, is a terrible idea, destroying, as it does, the elegant simplicity and security of a secret paper ballot. Happily, most countries have so far spurned the idea, but that certainly doesn’t mean that the internet (and therefore the ubiquitous Google) is not deeply embedded in the election process. Election-related online advertising, for example, is rampant, much…

Ask Virginia Is my son really mine? Q I’ve been happily married for years, with a son of 14. The problem is that I remember my wife became friendly with another man about the time my son was conceived and I’m becoming convinced it’s his child. Can I ask my wife for a DNA test? It might upset her too much. But how can I get these thoughts out of my mind? A You can’t ask your wife for a DNA test. You could become very interested in genealogy and ask your family all to be tested for fun. This might shed some light on the situation, though I doubt it. In the meantime, remind yourself that boys often start becoming difficult at this age – especially around their parents.…

Candida Crewe (p17) has written six novels and one non-fiction book. For nearly 50 years, she’s written articles and columns for the Times, Guardian, Telegraph, Spectator and many more. John Sergeant (p24) was the BBC’s Chief Political Correspondent, 1992-2000, and Political Editor of ITN, 2000-2002. He interviewed Mrs Thatcher in Paris in her last days in office in 1990. Clive Aslet (p31) is Visiting Professor of Architecture at Cambridge University. Sir Edwin Lutyens: Britain’s Greatest Architect? is his latest book. He wrote The Story of the Country House. Mary Killen (p36 and p57), our Beauty Correspondent, is married to fellow Oldie columnist Giles Wood. They wrote Country Life: A Story of Peaks and Troughs and The Diary of Two Nobodies.…

Grumpy Oldie Man Long mislaid in my chaotic west-London house – which exists, as we will see, in a microclimate of its own – is a gift from the late Michael Winner. He and I were enemies for years, and then friends. It was once a fact of journalistic life that persistent feuding with the highly sensitive would end either in the High Court or at lunch. In our case, after many flirtations with the former, we settled on lunch. We hit it off, as portly, irascible Jews tend to do. So it was that the mannerly old boy presented me with a box of stress balls. Squeeze one of these white spheres, and ‘Calm down, dear!’ would emerge in those memorable dulcets. What necessitated the hunt for the box…

25th June 1944. 37 Chesham Place, London SW1 Darlings [Laura’s six siblings], My life seems to go on very much the same. I broke my record by having a tummy upset the day before D-Day. D-Day sent my temperature up. [They] plugged M&B [antibiotic] down me, which made me feel like a damp piece of fawn-coloured blotting paper! So I missed D-Day and Lady R [Lady Reading, Laura’s boss in the WVS] celebrating her CBE, and got back to the office when all the excitement was over, and when everyone decided they hadn’t time to communicate with us, so there really wasn’t much to do, and I nearly chewed my typewriter into shreds, longing to be a WRN driving a picket boat, or something of the sort. I now find…

Never go back. Or, then again, cast aside any such thinking and, like a famous rock star, book the venues, load up the vans and hit the road one more time. John Cleese isn’t a rock star and isn’t exactly hitting the road. But he’s certainly reaching deep into his back catalogue – with a London West End stage production of Fawlty Towers, exactly 50 years after it was first recorded at BBC Television Centre. He seems remarkably upbeat about it all. And now he’s 84, there’s no slowing down (a stage version of Monty Python is planned for next year in London); no moaning about the travails of advancing age and, thank goodness, no mincing of words. ‘The reason Fawlty Towers got made was that there were executives at…

Mary Killen’s Beauty Tips Twenty-five years ago, I accompanied a colleague to a shop in Bond Street, where a dress was being held for her to try on. She wanted me to give my ‘honest opinion’. The dress was presented. It was a thing of beauty which fitted perfectly. The woman in question was a top-ofthe-range stunner and bursting with personal charisma. So why did I advise against purchase? Because it was a sleeveless dress and the sleeves were scooped low to allow a side view of the armpit. No problem with the outside of her arms – these were smooth and taut. It was the crinkly, testicle-like excrescence of bunching crêpe, spilling out from the armpit area, that was the swing factor. I remember being shocked by the implacability…

Country Mouse Mary holds that there’s no point in my trying to find greener grass by relocating to a corrugated former Wesleyan chapel perched on a Shropshire hill. Forget the tragedy that Shropshire has become fashionable. No, Mary believes I am a ‘dyed-in-the-wool troublemaker’. No matter where I was, as sure as night follows day, I would start to grumble about the neighbours and develop obsessions about their behaviour. For example, why, I have kept asking her this week, does one of our neighbours have uneaten Easter eggs still in their original boxes clearly visible on his kitchen windowsill when they are an obvious invitation to theft? Should I ask him if there is some sort of problem? Wherever I hung my hat, she insists, I would polarise small-scale local…

Sophia Waugh: School Days Children need to be more frightened of their parents – frightened enough, at any rate, to get out of bed and go to school. What happens when the staff are frightened of the parents? I am not pusillanimous by nature. When it comes to the old fight-or-flight instinct, I am fight every time. I pull myself up to my full 5’3” and look the aggressor in the eye. This did not work last month when I was savaged by a dog, nor does it always work with maddened adults, but (on the whole) it achieves results. Unfortunately, an enraged parent often has as little logical thought process as a rabid dog, and that is when we are in trouble. The number of parents abusing teachers is…

The Doctor’s Surgery Sometimes – for example, when I try to find out the prevalence of Dupuytren’s contracture – I wonder whether Pontius Pilate wasn’t on to something when he asked what truth was. A search into Dupuytren’s contracture – a thickening of tissues in the palm of the hand – gave me figures that ranged from a third of one per cent of the population to 20 per cent. It depends on the age group, and also on what stage of the contracture counts as a case. One estimate for Britain was 0.69 per cent of the adult population, which sounds at least plausible. Apparently, the incidence has doubled in the last 15 years or so, for reasons that are not understood. Dupuytren’s contracture is caused by an overgrowth…

I was born in Edinburgh in 1955, joining an older brother and sister, my mum and my dad in a typical upstairs-downstairs tenement block. Dad, a bobby on the beat (and a mason), discovered there was a need for police in New Zealand, with promise of your own quarteracre and good pay. Dad jumped at it and hopped on the first ship, with a view to setting up home with Mum and us kids to follow. So far, so good. As the ship had a layover in Melbourne, he met the local police and, after a secret handshake, was offered an even better deal to join the Melbourne force. He promptly sent a telegram to Mum, asking whether he should carry on to NZ or stay and set up in…

NICHOLAS LEZARD All That Glitters By Orlando Whitfield Profile £20 About halfway through this telling of the story of Inigo Philbrick, the young art dealer imprisoned for seven years for fraud in 2022, I was reminded of a childhood memory. It was of the millionaire (he’d now be a billionaire) Laszlo Carreidas in Hergé’s Tintin adventure Flight 714. In one frame, we see Carreidas having a phone conversation with an art dealer about an upcoming sale. ‘Three Picassos, two Braques and a Renoir? … Junk!’ he says. ‘Anyway, I haven’t an inch of space to hang them.’ But in the next frame he says. ‘What’s that? … Onassis after them? … Then buy! Get them all! … What? … I don’t care how much, buy!’ And that is as good…

DAVID WHEELER Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life By Jason Roberts riverrun £25 The year is 1707. Separated by some 700 miles (as the Corvus comix flies), two naturalists are born, destined for world fame. Social climbing (sorry, mobility) saw their names elevated in search of greater status. Carl Linné’s father had already Latinised the family’s Swedish name to Linnaeus. George-Louis Leclerc, a salt-taxcollector’s son, in later life appended ‘de Buffon’ to his handle, echoing his origin in the ‘minuscule settlement’ in the rural Burgundy village of his birth – which he eventually bought lock, stock and barrel. Both penned colossal works in an attempt to name and classify the every living thing of the book’s title. Their rivalry stemmed from Linnaeus’s seeing all…

History About 200 years ago, central London began a transformation without equal in its history. Over two decades or so, many of the buildings, vistas and streetscapes were built that still define the city, from Regent’s Park to the National Gallery, having survived the attentions of the Luftwaffe and town planners, just about. How did this happen? The Regency and the reign of George IV are usually associated with conspicuous consumption, post-Napoleonic War deprivation and oppression, and the selfishness of an aristocratic class yet to be shamed into the public philanthropy of the Victorians. In some ways, the London this ruling class produced – grand, upscale, austerely classical – would seem to justify such a reputation. But this was also the time when London’s centre was being deliberately thrown open…

One of the keenest viewers of the six-part Emmy-winning The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, when it aired in February 2015, was the star himself, Bob ‘killed them all’ Durst. The docuseries, written and directed by Andrew Jarecki, investigated the disappearance of Durst’s first wife, Kathie McCormack, in 1982, the Mafia-style assassination in 2000 of his best friend, Susan Berman (who provided Durst’s alibi after Kathie’s disappearance), and the murder and dismemberment of his neighbour Morris Black, 71, in Texas, 2001. The only death for which Durst stood trial was that of Morris Black, whom he killed while in hiding disguised as a mute woman. Pleading self-defence, Durst was acquitted by a redneck jury. They thought he had every right, as the heir to a $100m real-estate…

This spring, try Regional Cooking of England (edited by Carol Wilson). It’s a hefty, encyclopedia-sized 650-pager, with 280 updated recipes set out on double-page spreads with numbered steps and elegant, updated photographs. All the old favourites are present and correct – braised oxtail, steak-and-kidney pud, mackerel with gooseberries, angels on horseback, syrup sponge, elderflower cordial – and not a pomegranate seed in sight. The only olde-worlde element is a scattering of sheep safely grazing, dreamy Cotswold villages and misty woodlands in spring – lovely. Recipes lean towards the family size (six) – suitable for May Day picnics. Forgive the need to curtail the recipes – the full glorious book is a bargain at £25. Every kitchen should have one. Devilled eggs This is a grander version of the Queen Mother’s…

Back in the 1980s, an American academic called Bob Goldman conducted research among some of the best young college athletes in the States. He asked them a simple question: if there was a drug available that would guarantee you an Olympic gold medal, world championship success and total dominance of your sport and which was completely undetectable, would you take it? To a man, woman and somewhere in between, they all said yes. Where could they sign up? He added a caveat: what if the drug did all that but also resulted in death by the age of 30? Would you still be up for it? Astonishingly, more than half his sample group said they would. They were in it for the glory. Never mind how short-lived. Next year, the…

Do you believe in net zero? Woe betide you if you don’t, because it has taken on the mantle of a national religion to rank alongside the NHS. The government has passed a law to say we must hit it by 2035. Labour has responded with an even more evangelical 2030 pledge. Neither party has the courage – or perhaps even the knowledge – to spell out how much this will cost. Ah, but we must all do our bit to save the planet, mustn’t we? Just think of the example we will set to the rest of the world if Britain achieves net zero for CO2 emissions by 2035. Other countries will gasp and stretch their eyes, and rush to follow our example. Except that, as with the NHS,…

Here are some delights for you! Charles Lamb (not the great essayist) was a somewhat sad and lonely child, born in 1816. His particular passion was a fascination with chivalry and tournaments. And he built an exquisite castle for hundreds of pet guinea pigs. His family’s estate-carpenter at Beauport in Sussex was responsible for creating this most marvellous little fortress, known as Winnipeg, topped with heraldic banners and castellations galore. By 1830, it had hundreds of tiny residents. After their deaths, each and every one of them was given a proper funeral. From the age of seven, he created this kingdom for his creatures. At eight, he started to write the story of the guinea pigs’ lives. He called it ‘The History of the Kingdom of Winnipeg from the Foundation…

IN COMPETITION No 305 you were invited to write a poem called Dawn Chorus. I liked Charles Owen’s description of the cock or rooster as ‘Hot hacksaw-headed, braggart-breasted,/ Liveried in flame’. Wally Smith was right to call ‘A jay’s call like a block and tackle’. Dorothy Pope addressed a ‘spry robin on your self-entitled post’. Finlay Campbell considered the man for whom ‘Their din may well induce a swift return to bed/ Where, if sober, he may listen to early morning radio/ Emitting information he has no wish to know.’ Commiserations to them and to Fay Dickinson, Bill Greenwell, Brian Howe, Christine Ractliff, Richard Spencer, Fiona Clark, Mike Berry, Max Ross, Ann Beckett, Philip Wilson and Terry Baldock, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with…

Grandmother lifted into air as jacket caught on shutters Daily Telegraph ‘True gentleman’ TV presenter Andi Peters spotted in Conwy North Wales Chronicle Café to reopen today amid bollard works The Press (York) £15 for published contributions SIGN UP! SIGN UP! for the FREE Oldie newsletter Every Friday, we will send you the very latest stories and features – the more timely stuff which doesn’t make it into the magazine. And a joke from the late great Barry Cryer. Plus you get advance notice of our literary lunches, reader trips and courses. Don’t miss out. Go to www.theoldie.co.uk and enter your email address in this box: Sign up to our weekly e-newsletter…

WHO WAS Bruce Montgomery? Bruce Montgomery (1921-78) was a composer and author. If you’ve watched films of the 1950s and 1960s, including the early Carry Ons and the series started by Doctor in the House, you will have heard his music, and aficionados of classic crime fiction still enjoy the witty novels and short stories of Edmund Crispin, his pseudonym. Montgomery read Modern Languages at Oxford, where friendships began with Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin. Initially terrified by his apparent sophistication (whereas they went to the pub for beer, Montgomery stomped off to the bar of the Randolph Hotel to drink spirits), Larkin soon found that ‘Beneath this formidable exterior … Bruce had unsuspected depths of frivolity, and we were soon spending most of our time together swaying about with…

Gilbert Keith Chesterton – born 150 years ago, on 29th May 1874 – never quite goes away. He’s still widely read and quoted by people who rely on speechwriters rather than books. He’s a major voice in conservative circles, in particular. The Father Brown stories (even if twisted beyond recognition) are always on television. He speaks to modernity as though he were an especially brilliant and informed neighbour. He wrote the novels The Man Who Was Thursday and The Napoleon of Notting Hill, and biographies of St Francis, Thomas Aquinas and Charles Dickens. His analyses of history include Orthodoxy, Heretics and The Everlasting Man. He poured out oceans of journalism. There was poetry too, including The Ballad of The White Horse, The Rolling English Road and Lepanto. Born in 1874…

Oldie Man of Letters I thought about voting in the local elections, but in the end I decided against it. I belonged to that very large number of people – millions – who never wanted the embarrassment and expense of a London mayor in the first place. We are comparable to the millions and millions of Welsh who never wanted a national assembly – the majority of Welsh people. Millions of Scots – not a majority, but nonetheless a sizeable proportion of the population – did not want a Scottish parliament. Voting in a mayoral election would only encourage whatever fool got chosen. London was much better organised by the old GLC. The mayors have all been inefficient show-offs who, in so far as they’ve had any control over things,…

Mother fell. She ended up sitting, back against the wall, like a weary-looking soft toy on a slow edition of The Repair Shop. I called the emergency services. While I was on to them, I told them my underactive thyroid medication had recently delivered me a massive dose of adrenalin. You hear about adrenalin allowing people temporary uncanny feats of strength – a child lifting the end of a tractor to free a trapped lamb. As I waited for the ambulance, I wondered whether I should attempt some equally impressive act with my mother’s monster-truck-esque undercarriage. I didn’t bother them with this. Instead, as I reported back to Mother, ‘They said I should simply stay with you and just keep talking to you.’ Mother said, ‘Tell them I say, “Haven’t…

An early morning scene: Father (from the bottom of the stairs): ‘Come on, Tommy – time you were up and off to school.’ Tommy (from upstairs): ‘I’m not going to school today.’ Father: ‘Why not?’ Tommy: ‘Because the teachers ignore me, the children bully me and I hate the place. So why should I go to school?’ Father: ‘Because you’re the headmaster.’ I wonder how on earth the school governors ever came to appoint Tommy as headmaster. Unfortunately, I know I have something of Tommy in me. It is possible for all of us to be in a muddle about responsibilities and relationships with the people with whom we work and live. We are under an obligation to be at the disposal of others, irrespective of what their attitudes towards…

Rose Dugdale's rebellion SIR: The Old Un asked readers to send suggestions as to about why terrorist Rose Dugdale rebelled (March blog). I can perhaps own up to what changed her. It could have been the night in 1963 when I was ordered to sleep with her. I met her at a party when I was doing a summer school at Stanford and she was at Berkeley. We used to meet up at weekends and drive to local sights, eg Hollywood, Big Sur and Yosemite. It was there that on a Saturday night we tried to book two rooms and were told to ‘shape up’ and share a room. Fortunately, when we came back at midnight a second room was available and so I never had to ‘sleep with a…

In 1948, Dr Goodenough published a book about a fictional family, the Neverwells. Their many complaints were diagnosed and treated by the wise, all-knowing doctor. The Neverwells were the forerunners of today’s health columns. The list of illnesses, diseases and treatments covered grows and grows. Week after week, sufferers and survivors of illnesses relate their ‘journey’. Allow me, then, to introduce Miss Neverill – myself. Whether by luck, good genes or mind over matter, I have never been ill in my life. My continuing good health at 80 has nothing to do with the ministrations of the medical profession. I haven’t been to a doctor for years, and it’s more than half a century since I was a patient in an NHS hospital. Although this may sound irresponsible, I have…

MARY KILLEN Away Weekend By Lesley Fernández-Armesto Quadrant Books £10 There are not enough female participants in the genre of comic fiction. Entering the ring for the first time, aged 67, comes Lesley Fernández-Armesto, who has delivered a perfect comedy of English vs American manners. No racism is permitted these days, of course, but if you happen to have any bugbears about hearty Americans with gleaming rows of teeth set into rictus smiles, yet with senses of humour contrasting with our own, you will enjoy this gentle ridicule by proxy. Geraldine is a 55-year-old, comfortably-off divorcée, living alone in a bijou mews in St John’s Wood with only a toy poodle for company. Her ex-army officer husband, Jonty, now at a desk job in Whitehall, has inexplicably left her for…

PAUL BAILEY James By Percival Everett Mantle £20 The title of Percival Everett’s typically inventive and thoughtful new novel alerts the reader to its bold intentions. James, the narrator and principal character in James, has been known since the 1880s as Jim. He’s the slave owned by the God-fearing Miss Watson who befriends Huck Finn in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn – probably the best-loved of Mark Twain’s books. Twain’s Jim is superstitious and uneducated; Everett’s James is neither, for reasons that are made clear in the opening pages of his story. Everett and Twain are as one in their affection for, and admiration of, Huck. The boy’s innate decency and inquisitive spirit are preserved here, as they should be. In Huckleberry Finn, it’s Huck who attempts to teach Jim about…

Showbusiness is like sex. When it’s wonderful, it’s wonderful. But when it isn’t very good, it’s still all right. Max Wall Women, even more than the working class, is the great unknown quantity of the race. Keir Hardie Will she kiss him under the nose, or underneath the archway where her sweet William grows? George Formby I have one aim – the grotesque. If I am not grotesque, I am nothing. Aubrey Beardsley A library is a place where you can lose your innocence without losing your virginity. Germaine Greer One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done. Marie Curie I was a halfway-decent-looking English boy who looked nice in a drawing-room standing by a piano. Peter Lawford Well, if I called…

Wyndham’s Theatre, London, until 8th June Brian Cox was born to play James Tyrone, the angry patriarch in Eugene O’Neill’s greatest play. Like Logan Roy, whom Cox played so well in the hit TV series Succession, Tyrone is a geriatric tyrant, furious that his feckless children haven’t inherited his will to win. In Succession, Cox played a wealthy tycoon, ruling over a vast media empire. Here he plays a washed-up actor, stuck in a creaky old house in Connecticut. Yet, despite their contrasting fortunes, these characters are kindred spirits – modern King Lears, both raging against the dying of the light. Cox is a stage actor of tremendous power and subtlety. How good to see him back where he belongs, in the West End, in a classic play. O’Neill wrote…

Reggie St Cloud, Brenda Last’s brother in Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, ranks highest in my gastronomic pantheon. To describe him as omnivorous would damn him with faint praise. ‘He ate in a ruthless manner, champing his food (it was his habit, often, without noticing it, to consume things that others usually left on their plates, the heads and tails of whiting, whole mouthfuls of chicken bone, peach stones and apple cores, cheese rinds and the fibrous parts of the artichoke).’ Well, Reggie and all who sail with him, I have found just the place for you: Fowl, a beak-to-feet restaurant in St James’s. They use every part of the feathered beast in their burgers. Until recently, their chicken-leg corn dog came complete with claw on the plate, albeit…

Renault’s adopted Romanian orphan, Dacia (pronounced datcha), are rightly renowned for their range of cheap, reliable, no-frills vehicles. They do exactly what they say on the tin. Now, courtesy of Dacia, within months we’ll be able to buy something that has so far eluded the UK market – an affordable electric vehicle (EV). It’s called the Dacia Spring, and they’ve already sold 140,000 on the Continent. They delayed marketing it here because, in the words of designer David Durand, ‘It was lacking a bit of modernity.’ It will start at a touch above £17,000, significantly undercutting the £26,000 Chinese BYD Dolphin. For that money, you get an electric motor of either 44bhp or 64bhp with a small 26.8kWh battery, delivering a claimed range of 137 miles. It has four doors…

Upon this promise did he raise his chin Like a dive-dapper peering through the wave Who, being look’d on, ducks quickly in, So offers he to give what she did crave But when her lips were ready for the pay He winks and turns his lips another way. William Shakespeare, from Venus and Adonis, verse 15 The ‘dive-dapper’ Shakespeare refers to is the little grebe (Tachybaptus ruficollis), popularly known as the dabchick. Grebes are Podicipedidae (podex/ rump, pes/foot). Their lobed feet are positioned far back, with paddles replacing tails. The dabchick was Podiceps but has been renamed Tachybaptis (quick diving). It is the most common grebe, with 7,300 breeding pairs. The great crested grebe has 4,900. But it has fewer winter migrants: 8,000, compared with 13,000 great crested. Three other grebes that breed…

Is there something you really miss? Not knowing where the light switch is in the middle of the night. And I miss the dog terribly. He’s very grumpy. He’s a cockapoo. If he were a person, he would be the Major in Fawlty Towers. Do you travel light? Hand luggage only. The most boring thing to pack are all the endless charging devices. What’s your favourite destination? The Caribbean, the sea there, and Portugal – the Algarve, where my parents lived. But, really, I like going for holidays where the dog can come – Cornwall in particular. What are your earliest childhood holiday memories? Because I come from an actor family, it was feast or famine. We’d either have a glamorous villa in Majorca, such as when my father sold…

One of the joys of top-level bridge is visiting new places. I loved last year’s European Open Championships in Strasbourg. I’d be lying if I said that my team performed brilliantly, although we had our moments … such as this one featuring Simon Cope of Hertfordshire. Both Souths opened a light one-club. Our West player gambled a one-notrump overcall and boldly stood it when North doubled. North naturally kicked off with the ace of diamonds; he then continued with a low diamond, prepared to give up a trick to declarer’s queen to set up four winners. However, after winning that bare queen, declarer could cash out the clubs to escape with only one down. (1) Splinter bid agreeing hearts. (2) Cannot sign off with such good trumps and no wasted…

Taking a Walk Five minutes from the madness of Junction 13 of the M25, where Britain, frankly, appeared irredeemably ruined – dirty, noisy, frantic, ugly – there was a small place that changed everything. Along a suburban road, cherry plum blossom exploding from front gardens, turning sharp left, I bumped the car down a puddled and obscure dead-end track: Magna Carta Lane. At the bottom was a collection of tatty barns. ‘This car park is small,’ said the least helpful of a blizzard of National Trust notices. It wasn’t a beauty spot – just a rural farm – and suddenly Britain was beautiful again. The warm air and light breeze sang of spring. The small birds knew it, and they sang too, from all directions. A bumble-bee toured the bullace,…