Indholdsfortegnelse for August 2021 i The Oldie

When I am watching TV with my wife, we’re often torn between a new episode of Location, Location, Location and a rerun of our absolute favourite, Bargain Hunt. When I am watching TV with my friend Maureen Lipman (and hidden cameras are filming us in the process for Celebrity Gogglebox), it’s a toss-up between Channel 4’s Naked Attraction and Netflix’s latest ratings winner, Sex/Life. Both are utterly appalling and completely gripping. In a nutshell, Naked Attraction is a dating show where people pick potential partners entirely on the basis of what they look like starkers. And there are a lot of close-ups – so you don’t miss a thing. For me, the star of Series 5 (Series 6 is already in the making) was Ian – at 75, the programme’s…

Mount Disappointment is about 50 miles north of Melbourne. It is aptly named. On its sere foothills, I performed my first act of gross immodesty with a compliant, young, exotic dancer. It was on a Good Friday, long whiles agone. Boxing Day is another important landmark in my youthful education. Perhaps the most important – for it was on that day, 50 years ago, that I put the cork in the bottle. It was half a century ago, but I can still remember that remarkable day. I woke up in a small private hospital in my home town of Melbourne – a place that an American friend describes as a hospital for thirsty people – and I couldn’t remember why I was there. A nice nurse or, should one say,…

Bob Dick was given an impressive funeral Mass at the Brompton Oratory in the mid-1990s, even though he wasn’t a Catholic. A priest he’d befriended at the church was full of admiration for him. He mesmerised everyone he met. I couldn’t believe he was gone in his mid-60s. Over the years, Bob helped me during my three different careers as documentary-film-maker, freelance journalist and novelist. Born in 1929 in a poverty-stricken tenement slum in Glasgow, he contracted polio which left him with a limp. He worked his way to London, was involved in the property market and then took to money-smuggling. Married twice, Bob had a son, Scott, who ran a carpet-cleaning business. He cleaned Princess Margaret’s carpets – they were disgusting, Scott said. In the 60s, Bob ran a…

Three people may keep a secret if two of them are dead, said Benjamin Franklin. The sickening truth about travel writers is that they reveal secret locations in exchange for a free trip. It’s a Faustian pact and I must admit I bear some guilt in this respect. I once wrote about self-rewilding Covehithe near Southwold, our fastest-eroding piece of coastline, painted by John Sell Cotman and England’s answer to the Namibian Skeleton Coast. The ghostly emptiness was its main charm, but the piece triggered such a stampede that the emptiness itself was also eroded. Gerald Durrell let the cat out of the bag about the delights of Corfu. Peter Mayle ruined Provence. But I forgive South Tyneside Council, who briefly turned the area into Catherine Cookson Country, encouraging group…

They are coming for the books now. I recently met a just-retired head of diversity at one of the largest international companies in the world. She had retired early because, in her words, ‘it was all becoming too woke’. This from a woman whose entire career had been spent successfully fighting against discrimination. Our job as teachers is of course slightly different. The curriculum’s response to diversity has been interesting to watch over the past 20 years of my career. There was a point where part of the GCSE exam was on ‘Poems from Other Cultures’. Some of them were good; some of them less so. But, hey, they were from another culture – so worth including. Were I from a minority of any kind, I might be offended by…

François Richli, manager of the Aman boutique hotel in Java, died after a heart operation in Dubai. He was given a multi-faith farewell with a Hindu cremation in Dubai, a Buddhist wake with four venerable monks at the Yatagala Temple near Galle in Sri Lanka and another one in Java. There were Zoom tributes from London, Toronto, New York and Phnom Penh. Family friend Hen Tatham was the celebrant, introducing the proceedings from Sri Lanka. Tatham said Richli was a true gentleman with impeccable style who ran through life with all flags flying. Daughter Bronte described his final days in Dubai. Son Ivo said that at the end of his life, his father was the happiest he had ever seen him. Richli, from an Anglo-Swiss family, conceptualised, opened and ran…

My paternal grandmother advised me always to take the opportunity to meet prominent people, however briefly. She started me off by sitting me on a sofa to talk to Winston Churchill. I was prompted by Adrian Greaves’s memories (July issue) of guarding Albert Speer to remember another meeting. My regiment, the Grenadier Guards, was stationed in Berlin from 1979 to 1981. The wall was still up; our task was to defend the British sector under the command of the British Military Government. One of our tasks was providing the guard for Spandau Prison, a gloomy 19th-century jail with one inmate, Rudolf Hess (1894-1987): Prisoner No 7, as he was known. The Russians turned down numerous requests for his release; his presence allowed them continued access to the British sector. It…

Icon £12.99 In Sir Vidia’s Shadow (1998), Paul Theroux described the breakdown of his 30-year friendship with V S Naipaul, which had reached, he tells us in the subtitle, ‘across five continents’. So blinded was he by Naipaul’s talent that Theroux had failed to notice his mentor was a monster. It was only when Naipaul, recently remarried, dropped him that Theroux realised he ‘had freed me, he had opened my eyes, he had given me a subject’. Sir Vidia’s Shadow tells us a good deal about Naipaul’s dismal treatment of his first wife and about Theroux’s sense of his own sexual and moral superiority, but nothing at all about Anne, Theroux’s own first wife, whom he met in 1967, the year after befriending Naipaul. All we are told about the…

Canongate £14.99 When Jorge Luis Borges went to St Andrews to visit Alastair Reid, his friend and translator, in the icy early spring of 1971, he’d been blind for almost 20 years. But having dreamed of seeing Scotland all his life, he was not to be deterred by a worldly impediment. Especially when under the influence of his host’s hash brownies, he welcomed every patch of the St Andrews waterfront with open arms, quoting verse to the waves and sweet nothings to the sea breeze until a ditch or a pot-hole felled him. All this must have made him a rather difficult house guest. That may explain why Reid suddenly took himself off on an urgent errand, leaving Borges in the care of a lost and lonely American graduate student…

The Fleet Street into which I first wandered more than 40 years ago was still partly ruled by dynasties. But in a world of new conglomerates, they were most of them struggling to retain their newspapers. At the Daily Telegraph, where I found a berth, the Berry family were just about hanging on, with Michael Berry (Lord Hartwell) as chairman and editor-in-chief. Beaverbrook’s son, Max Aitken, had sold the Express titles in 1977 to a British property company, and David Astor had recently persuaded an American oil company to take the Observer off his hands. Vere Rothermere still reigned at the Daily Mail, which his great-uncle, Lord Northcliffe, had launched. It has been a similar story in America, where the Washington Post has been bought by the founder of Amazon,…

In the summer of 1851, 170 years ago, there was only one destination for the holidaymaker: London, and in particular Hyde Park, where the Great Exhibition was in full swing. Joseph Paxton’s astonishing Crystal Palace – doodled on a blotter when the original design was failing to inspire confidence – was opened by the Queen and Prince Albert on 1st May. For ten days, admission cost £1; from then on, it went steadily down until, by June, you could get in for a shilling Monday to Thursday, half a crown on Friday and 5s on Saturdays. Many visitors (including the Queen) came back, and 25,000 of them bought season tickets. What did they come to see? It was an ‘Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations’, including, but…

I was wrong to mock Dr Michael Mosley’s Just One Thing, in which the good doctor gave us a simple, health-improving idea every day. Standing on one leg was the most memorable, and cold showers the least appealing. Warm baths at bedtime were preferable, and ‘learning new skills’ the most time-consuming. But it certainly qualified as the most passed-on word-of-mouth recommendation of the Plague Year. Everybody I’ve met lately (a modest but significant group) excitedly told me it had revolutionised their lives – even the exercise-phobic Lynn Barber. So I’ve tried about half the ideas. I’ve been standing on one leg while cleaning my teeth. I kept (briefly) a gratitude diary and embraced green spaces (my rain-sodden July garden). As for my new skill (revived from schooldays), it is singing…

In 1978, I was a fairly regular traveller on the line between Norwich and London, as I had to attend meetings in the capital with my colleague Harry. One afternoon, we arrived late at Norwich station; luckily, our train hadn’t left and we set about looking for a compartment. Eventually we stumbled into one already occupied by two men. They turned to look at us and one of them said, ‘Hello, Harry. Haven’t seen you in a long time. The train’s late as usual – but what do you expect?’ The mid-Atlantic twang was as familiar as the face – which belonged to Hughie Green (1920-97). He’d been in Norwich for the press launch of a film he’d been appearing in. ‘It’s the kind of film that Britain does best,’…

Chervil is a herb more popular in France, where it is sometimes known as French parsley. Its leaves are delicate and lacy in appearance, more like herb Robert than parsley. The small, white flowers of chervil are attractive but, once it has reached that stage, the leaves are not worth having. The seed catalogues tell you to sow chervil any time between March and August, but I don’t think that is good advice. I have made the mistake of sowing the seed in spring, then not giving the plants enough water in dry weather. They ran quickly to flower and the leaves turned a russet colour. Now is the best time to start growing chervil. An early-August sowing – ideally just before a full moon, according to gardening lore –…

An intriguing premise in Danish director Thomas Vinterberg’s Oscar-winning film Another Round is that humans are born with a deficit of 0.05 per cent alcohol in their bloodstreams. The theory comes from Norwegian psychiatrist Finn Skårderud. Correcting this imbalance with an occasional slug of vodka allows four childhood friends, teachers at the same school, to become more creative and relaxed both professionally and personally. Until it doesn’t, of course. But I shan’t spoil the plot for you, other than to say that one particular cocktail features at an important juncture in the narrative: the Sazerac. A heady blend of rye whiskey, absinthe, bitters and sugar, it has the distinction of being the official cocktail of New Orleans, where it was invented some time in the middle of the 19th century.…

TWO PLACES LEFT In 1996, Patrick and Joan Leigh Fermor bequeathed the beautiful house they had built in the 1960s to the Benaki museum. It has recently been restored, and our group of ten readers will be one of the first to stay there. The house is right on the sea and there are plenty of terraces to which people can escape. Dominic Green will be our tour guide and leader; Harry Mount is also joining us. This is an extraordinary opportunity to have the house to ourselves and to be able to tour the area with such expertise. The house is available to rent for only 90 days a year. There is space for only ten guests; if this trip is full, please express an interest in a subsequent…

Kim Darroch has just published Collateral Damage: Britain, America and Europe in the Age of Trump. I hope someone has bought the film rights. Lord Darroch, 67, was the British Ambassador to Washington from 2016 to 2019. His confidential diplomatic cables to London – which included some unflattering remarks about President Trump – were leaked to the Mail on Sunday. Trump took umbrage and announced he would not work with the ambassador. Darroch resigned from the Foreign & Commonwealth Office. The tale has everything: a handsome hero (at six-foot-four, Darroch was one of the few who could look Melania, wearing high heels, in the eye), a powerful and unpredictable enemy (Donald Trump) and a disloyal boss, Boris Johnson, then Foreign Secretary. Then there was the mysterious figure who leaked the…

Here’s a surprise. The New House near Tunbridge Wells in Kent is inspired by the architecture of an industrial warehouse between Heathrow and Slough. It’s a rare and exquisite example of an English country house in the post-modernist style. I write ‘exquisite’ because, despite there being barely a single window on its marble façade, every inch of the building is quite beautifully executed. It is a startlingly original design for a dwelling, incorporating a glorious use of materials with their variety of textures and colours – yes, colours. Reigning supreme is its most satisfying attention to detail, applied both inside and out. It was designed between 1983 and 1986 by John Outram, my particular hero of the post-modernist movement. He also created the dazzlingly polychromatic Temple of Storms pumping station…

How are you? Still here… I had a bad fall in 2019 and lost three years – I shall be 86 this year and can’t really afford to scatter years around. You don’t need to weep into your pillow tonight about me – I’ve moved house, which has given me energy and excitement at putting something new together. Is there anything you can’t leave home without? The necessary pills. Something you really miss? There’s nothing like one’s own bed. What’s your approach to luggage? Our marriage [to the theatrical designer Julia Trevelyan Oman (1930-2003)] was one of total equality – we both had to carry our own luggage. Earliest childhood holiday memories? I never had any – there was no money. My father was bringing up a family of five…

My friend Richard Cumming-Bruce showed me this Seven Notrumps he had declared the other day. It was a beautifully played hand, and it would have been churlish of me to point out that Seven Hearts would have been somewhat easier. Dealer North North-South Vulnerable The bidding (1) Any hand with 23 or more points. (2) Positive (eight or more points) without a decent five-card suit. (3) This seems a tad precipitate. Wouldn’t Three Notrumps show the hand – after all, North has nothing more than originally promised? (4) Could South try Seven Hearts on the way to Seven Notrumps? His hearts could hardly be better for his Two Notrump (rather than two Heart) response. Declarer won West’s diamond lead with the king and proceeded to cash four rounds of diamonds,…

My ex is freezing me out Q I was married for 30 years and, for all that time, my wife and I spent wonderful holidays together with her family. I got on with all her relations – particularly my brothers and sisters-in-law – and they got on with my family, too. We’d all get together at Christmas. I honestly thought of her nieces and nephews almost as our own children. However, ten years ago we split up – a long story, but my wife was the one who walked out, as it happens. Not long after we divorced, one of her sisters had a 50th-birthday party and asked me – but then wrote, saying she was very sorry but she had to retract the invitation because my ex-wife objected. She…

Madeline Smith (p26) played Miss Caruso, the Bond Girl in Live and Let Die who had her dress unzipped by Roger Moore with a magnetic watch. A Hammer horror star, she was also in Up Pompeii. John McEwen (p79) writes our Bird of the Month column, illustrated by Carry Akroyd. He was art critic of the Spectator and the Sunday Telegraph and is a regular contributor to Country Life. Elisabeth Leigh (p22), a documentary director and producer, writes for the Sunday Times. Her novels include Greed. She is now writing a collection of short stories. Mark Palmer (p25) has worked in Fleet Street for over 50 years. He is Travel & Property Editor at the Daily Mail and the author of two books – about football and Clarks shoes.…

Not for years, if not decades, has any sentient being shown a slither of faith in my ability regarding any known sphere of human endeavour. This makes sense. If the traditional male-ranking system runs from alpha to omega, for me the Greeks are gonna need a bigger alphabet. A prangless two-minute car ride elicits shocked gratitude in the unharmed passenger’s eye. The successful exchange of one light bulb for another inspires pangs of disbelief. Loved ones react to the smooth transportation of a tray from one room to another with the awe once lavished on the conquering of Everest or the first footstep on the moon. You will picture my bemusement, then, at finding myself taken for a man of staggering talent by Erasima, my parents’ septuagenarian cleaning lady. This…

In the first few minutes of GB News, Mr Andrew Neil broadcast something as if it was intimately tailored to his intended audience, all of whose inside-leg measurements he knew already. His channel would not be peddling ‘gossip from inside the Westminster bubble’, he boasted. ‘Well, that’s a mistake, Brillo, old bean,’ I said out loud. After all, what is news, if not gossip? They are conjoined twins, the Gemini of the media constellation, as indissoluble as me and my iPhone (‘There are three of us in this marriage,’ as my husband says). Who’s up, who’s down, who’s in, who’s out of Downing Street, who’s had their jowls lifted in lockdown, who’s getting married, who’s getting divorced, who’s having an affair with whom… Don’t tell me you’re not interested in…

When I tell my grandchildren that I learnt to swim in the 1940s, when mums used to knit their children’s swimming costumes, they look at me as if I am mad. They don’t really believe me until I show them some old knitting patterns. In 1944, my first swimming costume was red, with what was known as a ‘bib front’ and had cross-over straps at the back. I was six years old and I loved it. Mum and I would go on the bus (a treat in itself) to the local swimming pool. Then we would stay in the shallow end and Mum would walk up and down across the width, supporting me by holding on to the straps at the back of my costume. As I dangled there, she…

Marilyn Monroe I answered my office phone to the sound of gargling. ‘Catarrh,’ explained a small voice. ‘This is Ray from the postcard fair. Friend of your dad’s.’ I remembered him now from my teenage years: a short dealer with a white mullet. He fished around inside cardboard boxes to retrieve his wares – old theatre programmes, posters, somebody’s wartime schoolbooks – before spreading them out in a six-inch wedge across his stall. ‘I’ve got an autograph book with Marilyn Monroe in. Thought you might be interested.’ Interested? Monroe was on every autograph-collector’s want list. ‘But has she signed in red ink?’ Red ink meant fake. You usually saw it on photos; the neat, curly hand – ‘Love and kisses, Marilyn Monroe’. The real thing was another story: an intelligent,…

What do Robespierre, the late Duke of Westminster and I have in common? Probably not much, other than that none of us ever liked fancy food. Robespierre sent hundreds of French aristocrats to the guillotine while reportedly living on a bowl of gruel a day. The Duke of Westminster, despite his billions, never wanted much more than an omelette in the evening. And me? I was a war baby, and a war baby’s tastes were and are mine. Plain is best. But if I go out to eat, where will I find anything plain these days? The restaurant world is flooded with funny foods. There I sit, balefully studying the menu, searching for something I recognise. Yet whenever my eyes alight on a dish I fancy, I find that it…

The Anglo-Saxon for August was Weod monath, ‘Weed month’. The only Shakespeare plays that mention August are Henry VI, Part I and The Tempest. In August 2017, Hurricane Harvey dumped more water out of the sky than any storm in US history: more than a million gallons for every person in Texas. On 1st August 1774, Joseph Priestley discovered oxygen. On 3rd August 1492, Christopher Columbus set sail for the Far East. Just over nine weeks later he landed in the Bahamas, thinking he had reached Japan. Louis Armstrong, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Louis Vuitton, the Queen Mother, Billy Bob Thornton and Barack Obama were all born on 4th August. At 5am on 6th August 1762, the Earl of Sandwich ordered the first sandwich. On 20th August 1949, time appeared to…

Flesh is, in the last analysis, grass. But increasingly enlightened medical opinion believes that more of it ought to be, at least in the intermediate phases, fish. Fish is said to be good for you, even if it is a myth that it does for your mind what we were once told that carrots did for our eyesight. Fish is often thought to stave off heart attack and stroke. I first realised that diet was more than a matter of taste when a (much older) cousin of mine tried to impress upon me that we inevitably took on the psychological characteristics of the animals whose flesh we ate. He had recently converted from gangsterism to vegetarianism, and being a disrespectful, sly little boy, I asked him what we became (mentally)…

Fifty years ago, in August 1971, the Clacton Round Table wanted to better their previous year’s hugely successful donkey derby – what to do? The Isle of Wight pop festival had done well the year before – as had Woodstock. Why not have a concert to raise money for good causes, four miles from Clacton and an hour from London – perfect! We schoolfriends bought our tickets (£1.50 each) and got the bus from Chelmsford. The line-up looked good: T Rex, Rod Stewart and the Faces, Curved Air, Mungo Jerry, Caravan – some of the biggest names in rock. Music started, after some delays, on Friday 27th August 1971 with a band called Hackensack and continued non-stop. If you fell asleep, you could miss King Crimson or Barclay James Harvest.…

Allen Lane £25 Prisoners of Time shares common ground with the two superb books that brought Christopher Clark to prominence. Iron Kingdom was a comprehensive history of the rise and fall of Prussia. The Sleepwalkers was his brilliant unravelling of the diplomatic entanglements that led to the First World War. It also hints, with mild provocation, at a philosophical stance: the historian will view all things, even Prussians and Germans, humanely. This humanity is evident in the two detailed historical papers included in the collection. There’s a study of the ambivalent career of Colonel General Blaskowitz, a senior Wehrmacht officer who threw himself down a stairwell on the eve of a likely acquittal at the Nuremburg Trials in 1948. And there’s ‘From Prussia with Love’ – an account of a…

Almost every human activity has its jargon, and much of it is dreadful. My pursuit, journalism, is not a profession – no qualifications are necessary – but it has a few words and expressions not widely used outside the world of hackery. Most are dull. Terms such as ‘filing copy’, ‘overmatter’ (the part of an article too long for the allocated space), ‘undermatter’ (the opposite), ‘subs’ (sub-editors) and ‘stringers’ (correspondents) do little to lift the spirits. ‘Deadline’ (originally a line round a military prison, beyond which a prisoner could be shot) is slightly more interesting and ‘the stone’, a table on which pages of type were ‘imposed’ by ‘compositors’, brings to mind an inky smear of hot-metal history. But many of these words are forgotten. I do not complain at…

Growing up on a farm, I learned to detest the outdoors as a place of pain and boredom. That boiling summer of 1976, when there was no water and lavatories were not to be flushed – I was heaving hay bales about; then corn stooks. This was Glamorganshire, but it was like southern Italy. The weather was always against you, with droughts ensuring nothing grew or non-stop rain meaning wheat and barley rotted in the fields. Lambing invariably took place in mud and drizzle. Stock had to be counted daily, wormed, sheared and selected for the slaughterhouse. The sheep were always escaping and had to be rounded up – a job taking hours. Cattle broke through fences and destroyed gardens, trampling wishing wells. Gates were left open by ramblers, and…

Grinling Gibbons, the great Anglo-Dutch wood-carver, died 300 years ago, on 3rd August 1721, aged 73. In our Spring issue, Loyd Grossman saluted him, and flagged up the exhibition Centuries in the Making, which opens the superlative carver’s tercentennial celebrations. That show will be at the Bonhams rooms in Bond Street from 3rd to 27th August, before travelling to Compton Verney in Warwickshire, from 25th September to January 2022. A new Grinling Gibbons Society has been set up under the patronage of the Prince of Wales, with Tristram Hunt as president. Gibbons’s patron John Evelyn described him as ‘the most excellent in his profession, not only in England but in the whole world’, and his influence and inspiration have continued through the centuries. This longevity is an important strand in…

Tabbouleh is a Lebanese chopped salad in which the dominant element must always be parsley. When you order tea in any café in the village of Sidi Bou Said outside Tunis, expect it to come topped with slivers of toasted almonds. Salsa romescu, a fiery Catalan sauce of olive oil and chilli emulsified with garlic and nuts, is traditionally eaten with rabbit and delicious with mashed potato. All this and more can be found in the great Arabella Boxer’s Mediterranean Cookbook. First published in 1981 when she was food editor of Vogue, it’s back in print with Grub Street as a sturdy little hardback, suitable for tucking into the picnic basket on a damp day on the Skegness seafront. The cooking, as you’d expect from the supremely stylish author of…

Sometimes in sport, defeat can be as valuable as victory. Not as celebratory, uplifting or glorious, maybe. But as an educational resource, there is little to beat it. When the England players were presented with their runners’-up medals at Wembley after faltering at the last in the European Championships, to a man they immediately took them off. As they did so, the knowledge that the nation’s hurt, already 55 years in the making, was to continue was etched deep into their forlorn faces. Gareth Southgate demonstrated, as he steered his team closer to silverware than any England side since 1966, that he is a manager of resolve, intelligence and appreciation. Dignified and diplomatic, as always he struck the perfect note in his graceful acknowledgement of defeat. This is not the…

In The Penguin Book of Bird Poetry the nightingale rates most poems, followed by the skylark, robin, cuckoo, song thrush and wren. The finches, for all their beauty, are also-rans, the linnet (Carduelis cannabina) pipping the goldfinch for the longest entry. Yet it is prominent in one of the best-known songs and one of the best-known poems in English. Don’t Dilly Dally on the Way was also billed as The Cock Linnet from the line ‘I walked behind with me old cock linnet’. It was written by Fred Leigh and Charles Collins in 1919 and, through Marie Lloyd, became a music-hall hit – a reminder that linnets were popular cagebirds not so very long ago. W B Yeats’s The Lake Isle of Innisfree has the lines There midnight’s all a…

Traffic roars away from London. Planes lower themselves gingerly towards the horizon. The river flows past. Brentford supplies a sensation of being the still point in a turning world. I walked from the railway station and took the Great West Road. Despite the M4 snaking through buildings to the north, the old Staines road was still six lanes wide and full of cars. This was office land and, post-COVID, it sang with abandonment. Every plate-glass building was adorned with ‘OFFICE TO LET’. Estate agents did not hide their desperation: ‘Attractive riverside setting. Excellent car parking. Available immediately.’ I hope the poor agents have a sideline in flogging sheds for home offices. As I turned down the steps onto the Grand Union Canal, the road noise vanished – and I was…

IN COMPETITION No 269, you were invited to write a poem with the title Laundry. Bill Holloway economically made laundry stand for violence in an Upstairs, Downstairs house. Allen Tyce impressively prefaced his poem with a quotation, ‘How beautiful it is to see all sorts of cloaks or blankets kept separate,’ from Xenophon’s Oeconomicus (8, 19). Adrian Fry told of Uncle Charlie, dodgy bookie, laundering money. E Gibson was very good on the embarrassing ignorance of making launderette machinery work. Jennifer Willis gave a picture of joy: ‘Sheets billowing like galleons fill the washing line in the orchard … I sit in my rocking chair with the crossword and a cup of tea/ And think to myself,/ There is nowhere else on earth that I would rather be.’ Commiserations to…

Plan to turn public toilets into ‘vibrant’ café Sunderland Echo Toothless man had knife to cut up food Blackpool Gazette Bus services delayed following reports of yacht in tree Eastern Daily Press £15 for published contributions NEXT ISSUE The September issue is on sale on 25th August 2021. FREE SAMPLE COPY If you have a friend who would like a free sample of The Oldie, tell them to call 0800 8565867. GET THE OLDIE APP Go to App Store or Google Play Store. Search for Oldie Magazine and then pay for app. OLDIE BOOKS The Best of The Oldie Cartoons 1992-2018, The Oldie Annual 2020 and other Oldie books are available at: www.theoldie.co.uk/readers-corner/shop Free p&p. OLDIE NEWSLETTER Go to the Oldie website; put your email address in the red SIGN…

Calais is anxious to counteract its image as a sad port with depressed migrants trying to cross the Channel. It’s ‘relaunching itself as an attractive seaside resort’, with a €46m (£39.4m) renovation of the seafront and the leisure facilities. The municipality is hoping that British motoring tourists crossing to France will stop off for a visit, rather than just rushing off southwards. Calais already has a stunning, sandy beach, with civilised facilities such as shower areas and public changing huts, seldom provided at the British seaside. It’s well worth a stop-over. Calais has some excellent restaurants, a decent bookshop in the Espace Culturel on the Boulevard Jacquard, and an old Notre-Dame church where General de Gaulle was married. It also has a fine Rodin statue, The Burghers of Calais, in…

Arafat, the young man at my local paper shop, was surprised when I asked for a bag of Golden Virginia and some Rizla papers. ‘I didn’t know you smoked,’ he said. ‘I don’t.’ Which is true, more or less. It’s just that, suddenly, 20 years or so after quitting, I had an urge to smoke again – and that urge has not gone away. In fact, having ‘just the one’ after supper on a Friday night with a glass of Redbreast Irish malt has become something of a tradition – and a profoundly pleasant one, despite the picture of a dead person’s leg on the front of the packet and a warning that ‘smoking clogs your arteries’. I’m not an advocate of smoking per se, but there’s something offensive about…

When I was a country mouse, I loved old things. My favourite quote – almost a maxim for living – was that lovely line from Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer: ‘I love everything that’s old: old friends, old times, old manners, old books, old wine.’ These wise words are spoken by the irascible country mouse Mr Hardcastle. He also complains that London ways are corrupting the countryside: ‘I wonder why London cannot keep its own fools at home! In my time, the follies of the town crept slowly among us, but now they travel faster than a stagecoach. Its fopperies come down not only as inside passengers, but in the very basket.’ Well, the follies and fopperies of the town have severely infected this town mouse lately. In the…

Jem Clarke is in his very, very early fifties, is five foot zero inches tall and has never left the family home in Cleethorpes, which he still shares with his parents… As I reassure my parents, constantly, an unsuccessful job interview is always a useful experience – if you learn something. After having my worst-ever job interview on the hottest day of the year, I learnt that my summer-interview wardrobe isn’t climate-emergency ready. I also learnt that an entry-level job in education – as a teaching assistant – is hard to come by if the superhead interviewing you is a rotter. In my search for a new vocation for my ‘third act’ in life, I’ve met two superheads. I’m thinking a job with ‘super’ in its title may attract a…

Anne Robinson’s knickers SIR: I too was at school with Anne Robinson, a year below her, and wonder why her recollection of reading to the school while standing on a chair with her knickers showing is so often repeated in interviews (Getting Dressed, July issue). As I remember it, the chair was like that of a tennis umpire and was sat on. Our skirts were below the knee and we wore big green over-knickers, known as passion-killers, which wouldn’t have alarmed a visiting bishop. Still, I suppose it makes a good story. Julia Ashenden (née Ross Williamson), Woodbridge, Suffolk Sergeant Wilson’s farewell SIR: Ken Pyne’s cartoon (June issue) – a ‘NOT DEAD, JUST RESTING’ gravestone prompting a passer-by to say, ‘He was a great actor’ – put me in mind…

Jonathan Cape £20 One evening in 1899, Thomas Hardy was working by the light of his desk lamp. A longlegs, a moth, a bumblebee and a fly were drawn to his desk by the bright beams. My guests besmear my new-penned line, Or bang at the lamp and fall supine. ‘God’s humblest, they!’ I muse. Yet why? They know Earth-secrets that know not I. That’s what Dave Goulson thinks, too. Bumblebees are his specialty. The most endearing of insects, he calls them: smart at navigation and memory, and socially complex. But then Goulson finds beauty, mystery and wonder throughout the insect world. His mission is to persuade humans to respect insect life, even if they can’t love insects. One million species have so far been identified. He estimates that another…

Chucking out books In the age of Zoom, in the background one’s bookshelves must look well filled, the titles evidence of wide and wise reading. In my house, they are a source of tension. ‘You can’t keep accumulating books,’ my wife said. ‘You’ve got to sort them out.’ Which meant chucking a lot out. As we picked among the titles, a lively discussion ensued. ’Why on earth do you want to keep that one?’ she said. I made a spirited argument for clinging on to a Bible, splitting at the seams and covered in tatty paper. We have quite a few Bibles around, the others in much better condition. I wanted to keep this relic, presented to me 60 years ago when I started at my last (state secondary modern)…

Half a century has passed since the death in July 1971 of Alan Rawsthorne, one of the best-liked and best-regarded composers of his time, not least by Proms audiences and organisers. The relationship began in 1942 with the première of his scintillating First Piano Concerto. ‘A work I would gladly listen to daily until Christmas,’ wrote one contemporary critic. It quickly became a Proms favourite, chalking up nine outings in 25 years, three of them on the popular Last Night. There were also several recordings, including one by Moura Lympany, a gramophone classic. Nor was it alone. The richly imagined Second Piano Concerto, a Festival of Britain commission, appeared in eight Proms seasons between 1952 and 2005, with a Last Night outing of its own in 1970. Clifford Curzon gave…

The Editor of The Oldie has not been himself lately. No longer the affable cove, he has become a worldly cynic, second-guessing foul play at every stage. I can date the origins to one terrible restaurant experience which he now recites to any casual passer-by, like his own rosary. It goes like this: ‘Maison François, the much-praised new restaurant on Duke Street, pulled a real fast one on a friend and me. Having had a bottle of their cheaper red wine for around £45, we asked for a carafe with half a bottle. They said they didn’t do a half-bottle of that wine. So I asked for something similar. [HEAVY PAUSE] Only when the bill came did it emerge they’d charged … £80 for the half-bottle. [VISCERAL WAIL] In other…

One friend has long had an electric BMW i3, another has just bought a VW ID.3, a third a Kia E-Niro (pronounced as in Robert De) and my brother-in-law a second-hand Tesla. Is it time to go electric? EVs account for only 6.6 per cent of new car sales. But interest is growing – despite their being more expensive than petrol or diesel equivalents, despite the inadequate charging infrastructure and despite the fact that you have to drive one about 50,000 miles before the environmental cost of producing it comes down to that of combustion vehicles. After price, the most commonly asked questions are about range. This depends on battery capacity. Lithium-ion batteries start at about 30 kilowatt hours (kWh) capacity and go up to 100 kWh, giving a range…

I am hoist by my own petard. I offer myself to you as skilled in internet matters. Yet I have almost been caught out by one of the most easily foreseen and old-fashioned of online pitfalls. One of the online services I have recommended for years has closed because it couldn’t make enough money. Fair enough – that’s life. But I almost didn’t notice, and so almost lost everything I had there. For years, I have been growing what became a very substantial family tree, with hundreds of people, photos and documents, using an online family-tree template called Genoom. Other family members could see and edit it. My son managed to trace his mother’s family back to several – probably mythical – Norse semi-gods and established that she is the…