Indholdsfortegnelse for April 2022 i The Oldie

The moment you’re born, you’re doomed. The moment you’re appointed Metropolitan Police Commissioner, you know it’ll end in tears. I have a soft spot for Dame Cressida Dick, the latest head of the Met to become unsaddled in post – for a special reason: we have a mutual interest in Oscar Wilde. I am president of the Oscar Wilde Society and she shares a birthday with him: 16th October. It was the men from the Met, of course, who arrested Oscar Wilde in 1895. In 2017, 120 years after Wilde’s release from Reading Gaol, I invited Cress (as colleagues call her) to propose a toast to his memory at a drinks party in his honour. She came with her partner, Helen. I think they had thought of announcing their engagement…

Adulting means existing in the world as an independent being. You have probably been adulting for most of your adult life – even if you were unaware that ‘adult’, a hitherto respectable noun and slightly less respectable adjective (see ‘adult movie’, ‘adult fun’ etc), had acquired verb status. It’s in the Oxford English Dictionary: ‘I’ve finished all my adulting requirements for the week.’ Adulting ought to connote fun adult things, like dashing off for a weekend in Florence; or having sex with strangers. In fact it describes those mundane, strangely under-publicised activities that end up taking up the greater part of adult life. Remembering to buy loo roll; familiarising yourself with a carinsurance comparison website; removing a build-up of lint from the filter of the washing machine; that sort of…

I included very few world events in the diaries I kept as a not-quite-adolescent in the early 1970s. There was one, though, on 9th November 1970. The next day, I wrote, ‘Play rehearsal. Quite good. Home at about 6 o’clock. President de Gaulle died and a programme about Houdini was postponed. Gillingham won away 1-0. Watson scored.’ I kept a diary throughout 1970, 1971 and 1972 – an entry every single day, adding up to 1,196 of them. They cover my life from age 12 to 14, and I look back in astonishment that I remained disciplined enough never to let a day go by without writing it up in all its glorious drabness. My preoccupations consisted of: the main events of the school day; what time I got home…

All bores are boring but not all boring people are bores. There are plenty of innocent folk who like nothing more than to share their anxieties about the village fête with you – and they’ll do it for 20 minutes you’ll never get back. Yet these are just ‘sweetie bores’, as Jennifer Paterson, one of the Fat Ladies and The Oldie’s erstwhile food writer, dubbed them. Their reliance on platitudinous observations has been immortalised in Robert Thompson’s Oldie cartoon, set in a typical suburban sitting room. The mandatory grotesque wife with her packed suitcase is screeching at her diminutive husband, who is pulling back the curtain to look up at the sky. Wife: ‘I’m leaving you because you’re so BORING!’ Husband: ‘At least you’ve got a nice day for it.’…

It is nearly 50 years since David Jason appeared alongside Ronnie Barker in Porridge, playing ‘Blanco’ Webb, an elderly prisoner doing life for murder. Jason was only in his thirties at the time and had to be heavily made up to come across as such an aged inmate. In those days, the character would have been an anomaly in British jails, but a recent survey by two charities found that there are more than 300 prisoners aged over 80 now behind bars. Crime used to be a young man’s game, but more than a sixth of all inmates are now over-50s. The Blanco Webb character appeared in only a few episodes, in one of which he and Fletcher (Ronnie Barker) get into trouble for stealing Jaffa Cakes. In another episode,…

‘All the richness of your invention, the magical embroideries you fling around your characters cannot make me nostalgic about the world I knew in the 1920s. And yet it was the same world as you describe, or at any rate impinged on it. I was a debutante in 1922, & though neither smart nor rich went to three dances in historic houses, Norfolk House, Dorchester House, Grosvenor House & may have seen Julia Flyte. Yet, even in retrospect, it all seems very dull. Nobody was brilliant, beautiful, rich & owner of a wonderful home, though some were one or the other. ‘You see English Society of the ’20s as something baroque and magnificent on its last legs. I fled from it because it seemed prosperous, bourgeois and practical and I…

● Berlioz trained as a doctor. ● Esperanto was devised by a doctor. ● 46 per cent of US doctors regularly prescribe placebos. ● In Qatar, cough mixture requires a doctor’s prescription. ● In Russia, doctors earn less than McDonald’s supervisors. ● In Liberia, there is only one doctor for every 25,000 people. ● During a doctor’s strike in Israel in 1973, the national death rate dropped by 40 per cent. ● The Incas were twice as good at brain surgery as doctors in the American Civil War. ● Modern Japanese medicine was founded on German teachings. Many older doctors in Japan still write out their patients’ diagnoses in German. ● Xiaoyi (‘Little Doctor’, pictured) has become the first robot in the world to pass China’s National Medical Licensing Examination.…

As someone who can no longer disguise, even from himself, the fact that he counts as elderly, I was naturally interested to read in the British Medical Journal an article about what is now called ‘elder abuse’. There are many forms and gradations of it, ranging from theft to abusive over-control to outright violence, affecting (so the article said) one in six people over the age of 60. The Office of the Public Guardian investigated about 12,000 cases of possible or alleged abuses of powers of attorney between 2015 and 2021, though unfortunately the article does not say how many of these were found to be baseless. Geriatricians are familiar with both the devoted care that many families provide for their oldest members and also, unfortunately, the greed for inheritance…

In 1960, I was 17. The Aust-Beachley ferry was operating under the shadow, almost literally, of its approaching nemesis, the first Severn Bridge, then under construction a short way upstream. I had a summer holiday job as a pier boy at a fiver a week – two pounds more than Bristol Zoo had paid me the previous year. My main task was to tie and untie the boats arriving and departing with their 15 or so cars. One boat was captained by Charlie Palmer, an uncle, I was told, of David Broome, a prominent showjumper. One day, he told me to look out for a salmon he thought he had hit. It took some believing, but Charlie didn’t joke much. Sure enough, a little later, I spotted a large salmon…

Yale University Press £25 Last September, an Irish auction house sold the remaining contents of Howth Castle, County Dublin. The house dates back to 1180, when it was first constructed, albeit in more primitive form, by the St Lawrence family. Their descendants remained in ownership, and in residence, until four years ago, when the present generation announced the place had been sold to an investment group. One might imagine that such news would be greeted by widespread dismay; that efforts would have been made to preserve this significant link with more than eight centuries of Ireland’s history; that state intervention might have been sought, and been forthcoming. On the contrary, the sale of Howth Castle and subsequent dispersal of its contents was met across the land with an indifferent silence.…

It’s an odd thing to find kinship with a killer whale. Surely there’s little I have in common with a six-ton swimming torpedo. But I share a rather unusual biological trait with this wily submarine predator. Females in both our species go through the menopause. Natural selection normally takes a brutal stance on a loss of fertility. For the vast majority of species, the message is simple: stop reproducing and you die. Just five known species buck this trend – humans and four species of toothed whale. Grandmothers, it transpires, are the key to our shared post-reproductive anomaly. Killer whales are souped-up members of the dolphin family, with the smarts to match. These highly intelligent, highly social cetaceans live in family units of five to 20 individuals. Originally it was…

It was the dog that got me thinking. Watching her streak across a field, I realised that ‘running’ was an inadequate description. Every few yards, she would take to the air with all four legs off the ground. Her exuberant flights were better expressed as ‘leaps and bounds’. But what’s the difference between a leap and a bound? Why not just ‘leap’, or just ‘bound’? My economical instincts said one was enough, and the two together were simply a lazy cliché. I was wrong. Sometimes a pair can be better than the sum of its parts. No one understood that better than Edward Lear, who wrote more than two dozen verses to the metre of ‘Teapots and Quails,/ Snuffers and Snails,/ Set him a sailing/and see how he sails!’ You’ll…

FESTIVALS IN 2022 ‘Normal service has been resumed,’ rejoices pianist Iain Burnside, artistic director of Ludlow’s annual English Song Weekend (8th-10th April). Being a prudent soul, he adds, ‘As I type these words with one hand, I cross the fingers of the other, muttering fervent prayers to the gods of viral variants.’ It would be an exaggeration to say that festivals – or ‘music meetings’, as such events were called before the Three Choirs Festival set up shop in Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester in the 1710s – have never had it so bad. But with the wreckage of COVID and Brexit strewn all about us, inflation once again raising its ugly mug above the parapet, and theatres, arts centres and churches, all key elements in the festival ecosystem, ‘going dark’…

FRENCH LESSONS Le Gavroche has stopped serving lunch. For 99.9 per cent of you, this will not be a ravens-leaving-the-tower moment – but something is up. And not just because of the pandemic. Could our servitude to the hegemony of French cuisine have come to an end? Generation X has no truck with our erstwhile inferiority complex which ran from the post-Waterloo British invasion of Paris to the advent of modern British cookery in the 1990s. They know nothing of those post-war menus which camouflaged culinary tragedies with French names, or just endorsed their wares with some much-needed franglais (‘gâteau cake’, ‘fromage Stilton’, ‘fruit and crème’). And are we Baby Boomers not a little embarrassed that we let Fanny Cradock show us how to impress our neighbours with a trolley…

CARS YOU CAN RELY ON Surveys of car reliability are big generalisations – like health guidance. We all know we shouldn’t drink too much, smoke or get fat, yet we may also know teetotal, smoke-free fitness fanatics who didn’t make their half-centuries as well as overweight old soaks puffing their way through their eighties. We know too that the most reliable cars in the world sometimes break down while some of the least reliable seem to potter on for ever. Nevertheless, generalisations are usually – to generalise – worth heeding. Thus, the latest Which? car guide, entitled The UK’s Best and Worst Cars, is worth a glance. Some of it is predictable, such as that Japanese and Korean cars are the most reliable. But some isn’t. I would have guessed…

What’s the story behind agnès b. – the brand name? It’s all thanks to Agnès Troublé, the company’s 81-year-old designer and founder. Her married name was Agnès Bourgois – hence agnès b. – but when she and her husband Christian Bourgois separated, she reduced the B to the lower-case b. Her most recent enterprise is a collaboration with the Mayor of Paris’s 13th arrondissement. They decided to do something more useful with a large, empty site than open another supermarket. Instead, they commissioned a brave new building in which social housing and a nursery for local kids sit side by side with a gallery housing the vast agnès b. collection of modern art, including David Hockney and Basquiat. There’s also a library, artist’s studio, shop and the offices of her…

In the cosy attic flat of a Dickensian terraced house in London’s Exmouth Market, an amiable, middle-aged couple called Barnaby Rogerson and Rose Baring are doing something slightly daft and rather splendid. They’re running a publishing house called Eland Books, which champions the golden age of travel-writing. Modern publishing is a numbers game: pile ’em high and sell ’em cheap. The big firms gobble up the smaller ones, and the marketing men decide what sells. Subject matter? Something topical or sensational (ideally a bit of both). Authors? The younger, the better, preferably already famous for something apart from writing, with a large following on television or (even better) social media. Eland does none of these things. Compared with most publishers, they’re tiny, and most of their writers are knocking on…

I imagined a stroll around Lundy might take an hour. A chunk of Dartmoor towed into the Bristol Channel, this ostensibly barren island is half a mile wide and three miles long. Arriving on the ferry from Ilfracombe felt like being transferred from one boat to another. After straggling up the steep track from the jetty to ‘the village’, I was marooned on the high bulk of the island, surrounded by glorious blue water but seemingly unable to reach it, the sheer cliffs of Lundy plunging down for 100 metres without much sign of beach or path. And while life on Lundy is not dissimilar to being on a cruise ship, with a seasonal ‘crew’ of islanders running the pub, shop, holiday cottages, farm and campsite, the island is far…

IN COMPETITION No 277 you were invited to write a poem called Morning Sounds. The entries were vivid: half domestic, half outdoor. Tim Lloyd observed that ‘A bin lorry approaching in reverse/Sounds like an asthmatic seal.’ Liz Piper remembered, during lockdown, ‘I run along the white line/Down the middle of the street,/No one else is near me – /Just the pounding of my feet.’ John Robinson reviewed the strategies for confronting tinnitus and concluded, ‘It’s not a scourge to dwell upon:/Acknowledge it, then carry on.’ Commiserations to them and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to Tony Douglass’s single-mindedly warlike birds. A fleet hweet-hweet redstarts away As camouflaged owls hoot the day. Almost silent, steel-hulled high, A…

Marion Shoard couldn’t find straight-talking and comprehensive advice when her mother fell ill, so she decided to write a guidebook for older people and their relatives. Her previous three books (including the award-winning A Right to Roam) examined countryside conflicts. She is on the Alzheimer Society’s Research Network and Kent Healthwatch. Her latest work, How to Handle Later Life, is published by Amaranth Books. After more than 30 years as a journalist on the Sunday Times, David Mills now spends his time walking his Lakeland terrier on Hampstead Heath and in the Suffolk countryside while ‘working from home’. He has discovered that having to look after a dog provides the perfect excuse to get out of all kinds of annoying invitations and social obligations. Henrietta Bredin is a writer, editor,…

For all of his working life, my late father-in-law had eagerly looked forward to retiring, which he did at the earliest opportunity, aged 60. Ah, what bliss, he imagined, to have nothing to do all day rather than rise at seven and catch the 8.10 into the city. He would have all the time in the world to himself. But, in common with many others, he soon discovered that retirement was not all it was cracked up to be. Before long, he became ill and instead of spending all day at leisure doing crosswords and sudoku, he was in and out of hospital. He died without really ever enjoying his retirement at all. And he is far from being the only one. For it is my belief that when people…

Wemmick’s Aged Parent in Dickens’s Great Expectations, beaming by the fire and enjoying his son’s jovial banter despite being stone deaf, remains the template for a contented and cared-for old age. But we read few such scenarios today. We read only of the high cost of care, the scarcity of carers and a post-pandemic picture of locked-down loneliness. ‘Who cares?’ has become a huge question. Richard Bates, having cared for his own father, has edited a collection of carers’ tales, Who Cares?: The Joys and Challenges of Unpaid Carers. Most unpaid carers are spouses or offspring and Bates asked a dozen of them to write their stories. They are rivetingly candid. They tell tales of small tyrannies, bathroom horrors, mulish sulks and nocturnal needs, twice as demanding as child-rearing. But…

Theatre Straight Line Crazy David Hare and Ralph Fiennes collaborate again in a play about Robert Moses, the master planner who created modern NYC. Bridge, SE1, 16th March-18th June Jerusalem Jez Butterworth’s mega-hit about rural England returns, with Mark Rylance reviving his award-winning role as Johnny Rooster Apollo, W1, from 16th April To Kill a Mockingbird Rafe Spall plays southern lawyer Atticus Finch in a dramatisation of Harper Lee’s novel. Gielgud 10th March-13th Aug The Glass Menagerie Tennessee Williams’s poignant drama stars A-lister Amy Adams. Duke of York’s, WC2, from 23rd May My Fair Lady Bartlett Sher’s New York production hasn’t announced a cast yet, but if the leads are as good as the original’s (here’s hoping for the NY Higgins, Henry Haddon-Paton), this will be a treat. Coliseum, 7th…

In his essay A Christmas Present, GK Chesterton explains that the gift of a walking stick presents him with a dilemma: its splendour offers an image to the world at odds with his own. Might the resplendent walking-stick, with its shiny handle and silver bands, come in a few days of his company to take on a more dingy, battered and comfortable look? Or will the stick transform him into its image? One thing’s for certain: if he walks down the street with it at present, ‘Most people will mistake me for a tramp who has stolen a gentleman’s walking-stick.’ Nowadays, what many people fear about being seen with supportive equipment is that it will proclaim them to the world as inadequate. I have known several older people who, weeks…

Women control a greater share of the UK’s wealth than ever before, with more than 60 per cent of the UK’s assets predicted to be in female hands by 2025. This rising financial power is to be celebrated, but it is also something for which women and their wider families need to prepare. There are numerous reasons for this structural change. It is driven by biological fact (women outlive men so there are twice as many women aged 90 years and over in the UK) and a fact of life (42 per cent of marriages in the UK end in divorce). The rise in female financial power is also a result of changes in society (more women than men now enter higher and further education). These changes freed many women…

Tom Ward (p16) played Dr Harry Cunningham in Silent Witness. He was also in Doctor Who, Death Comes to Pemberley, Vanity Fair and The Infinite Worlds of H G Wells. Jonathan Meades (p20) wrote Pedro and Ricky Come Again and An Encyclopaedia of Myself. His latest BBC film is Franco Building with Jonathan Meades. The cartoon of him (left) is by Mark Boxer. Duncan Campbell (p31) was a senior reporter and correspondent at the Guardian from 1987 to 2010. He wrote The Underworld: the Inside Story of Britain’s Professional and Organised Crime. Daisy Dunn (p34) is a classicist and the author of Not Far from Brideshead: Oxford Between the Wars. She also wrote In the Shadow of Vesuvius and Catullus’s Bedspread.…

The day approaches when historians must turn to analysing Little Britain’s final, irreversible descent into the post-imperial cesspit. Reassuringly, it won’t dawn for a long time. Next Thursday would be my best guess. But whenever it comes, the budding Simon Schamas will identify a host of disgraces that have lent this increasingly septic isle the enticing fragrance of a sub-Saharan failed state. Take, for instance, the barely reported fact that prisoners are dying, unattended, from such anachronistically lethal ailments as the stomach ulcer. The horror of the Windrush scandal fights for honours-board prominence with the kind of blatant corruptions (dirty Russian funding, PPI contracts gifted to ministerial mates etc) that afflict yucky foreign regimes, but could never happen here. Among all the symptoms of terminal decay, one that for me…

Wordsworth may be known as a nature poet. But one of his loveliest pieces is Composed upon Westminster Bridge from 1802, which sings of the joy of man’s creations. It’s actually less self-conscious than his quite tedious stuff about mountains and lakes. The poet stands still on Westminster Bridge early one morning and drinks in the urban scene: Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie Open unto the fields, and to the sky. Wordsworth’s sentiments were echoed later by the great romantic of the 1960s Ray Davies, in Waterloo Sunset. Contemplation of that sunset, he said, transported him to paradise. For those of us locked up in the city, it’s well to remember the wonder of bridges and their startling collision of utility and beauty. They get us from one…

I shall be – all going well – 78 in April. One advantage of my increasing age is that young people are so nice to me. The present generation of young people have occasionally been teased as ‘snowflakes’ – since they seem so sensitive to the cruelties of the world. But if they are, the other side of the coin is their notable kindness. They are always stopping me to ask if they can be of any assistance, as I wend my way. I’m often dragging a suitcase containing books, magazines, an iPad and heaven knows what else, and they rush, with the chivalry of Renaissance courtiers, to help me at every opportunity. The most eager are often young Asians, who explain, as they volunteer to carry my luggage up…

There is a very disturbing flier, which sometimes comes with The Oldie, from a charity drawing attention to cruelty to animals in China, with special reference to the fur trade. A photograph of the face of a caged dog carries a caption to the effect that the last thing it wants is to be let out: because it faces the certainty of being skinned alive – like the other dogs ahead of it, which it can see. This representation of Christ on the Cold Stone (right) has the same appalling inevitability of unspeakable pain. The genre originated in northern Europe towards the end of the Middle Ages and gradually worked its way south. This haunting example, by John of Flanders, who settled in Spain for much of his working life,…

The Oldie, 23-31 Great Titchfield Street, London, W1W 7PA letters@theoldie.co.uk To sign up for our e-newsletter, go to www.theoldie.co.uk Waugh’s explosion in court SIR: I thoroughly enjoyed A N Wilson’s memories of Auberon Waugh (March issue) and his piece reminded me of the only time I came across Waugh, which was at the committal proceedings in November 1978 against Jeremy Thorpe and three other men for conspiracy to murder the male model Noman Scott. I was a young reporter on the Western Morning News and had gone to the committal at Minehead, with the rest of the press pack, expecting to be able to report just the bare details. We were all aghast when George Deakin, one of the accused, applied for reporting restrictions to be lifted, meaning every word…

Weidenfeld & Nicolson £20 Literary representations of Oxford between the wars have been everywhere since Brideshead Revisited was published in 1945 – not least in John Betjeman’s Summoned by Bells (1960). Humphrey Carpenter’s group history The Brideshead Generation (1989) did an authoritative job of separating mythology and legend from documented fact. Now the classicist Daisy Dunn offers her own perspective on the subject. Does she have something new to say, or is this just another hoary wallow through well-worn tropes? Dunn’s earlier books, including Catullus’s Bedspread and In the Shadow of Vesuvius, make classical subjects seem fresh and vital, rather than relics of the classroom or lecture hall. Her erudition and energy are thrillingly applied to Not Far from Brideshead. It avoids the clichés of linen-suited students punting with teddy…

Levelling up meant something different in the 17th century. In the heady days of the Commonwealth, after the execution of Charles I in 1649, Levellers was the name opponents gave to a group of agitators from the new Model Army who saw an opportunity to remake the political landscape. They proposed, among other things, to give many more people the vote – all men over the age of 21, in fact, with a few exceptions: no servants, no royalists, no beggars and, of course, no women. In some ways, with their guns and printed books, these people do seem ‘early modern’, as historians describe the period. But there can be few better illustrations of how different our worlds really are than the reaction to this programme, which looks to us…

Whatever happened to melody? Songs you can sing along to? Radio 2 is supposed to cater for us old uns but increasingly I’m tuning in to be greeted by squeaks, whistles and thudthud-thud background beats with someone speaking over the so-called tune. I believe that last one is called cap. I also believe they’ve omitted the first letter. I’m not saying I don’t like music with a beat. Queen is one of my favourite bands and I love songs like We Will Rock You. The difference between then and now is that you can join in with dear old Freddie, whereas the pounding beats of many of today’s songs bludgeon you while at the same time relaying a series of notes that appear to be unconnected. Sound effects seem to…

‘Then her husband comes home – and the parrot says, “ ’Allo, Keith.” ’ How we roared whenever Barry Cryer delivered that punchline. In Broadcasting House’s tribute to Baz, Paddy O’Connell invited listeners to send in their own favourite Baz punchlines. A mistake. You can’t tell a joke with the preamble at the end. I winged off to BH my favourites: (1) ‘Please yourself, the hens are round the back’ (from the ‘I’ve run over your cockerel’ joke) and (2) ‘Hardly worth going home, is it?’ (the graveside joke). These were duly read out with professional éclat by Sean Rafferty: punchline first, preamble after. But it didn’t work, did it? Sigh. Baz fared better in a later programme, telling his own stuff: ‘A voice calls out in a train corridor,…

PAK CHOI Sweden produced two outstanding botanists in the 18th century: Carl Linnaeus and the slightly less-well-known Pehr Osbeck. Before in later life becoming a vicar, Osbeck spent time in China and brought back hundreds of new plant species, including the seeds of a vegetable now known as pak choi or bok choi. Seed sown under glass this month (March/April) may produce enough leaves to cut after five weeks. The thinned plants may then be transplanted into the ground, or grown on in pots. Alternatively, sow the seed outside from May onwards, and the pale green or white stems should be ready for harvesting in two to three months. But beware of bolting. There are varieties of pak choi described as bolt-resistant, but all are in danger of running to…

SWEET TALK You might suppose that the job of a wine writer offers a skeleton key to the world’s finest cellars, a never-ending ride on a gilded merry-go-round of grand cru tastings. Sadly not, although – just occasionally – an invitation plops on the mat (or, more often, pings into the inbox) that does have a distinct whiff of luxury about it. Such was the summons to dinner with Sandrine Garbay, cellar-master of the fabled Château d’Yquem in Sauternes, about 30 miles south-east of Bordeaux. Yquem is perhaps the most famous sweet wine in the world. It is also one of the most expensive: the great 2001 vintage, for example, will set you back around £300 for a half-bottle. In Yquem’s defence, however, you get a lot of grapes for…

As the saying goes, just because you’re paranoid it doesn’t mean they aren’t watching you. And if you go online, they certainly are watching. The problem is that it’s hard to be anonymous online. Even if we were, it would remove much of what the internet is useful for. You can’t anonymously buy broad-bean plants online. So we happily admit who we are and dish out information about ourselves. That has allowed Google, Facebook and others to reap a lot of hay. As we know, Google is free because we are the product, not the client; our details are used to sell targeted advertising. But how much can it really know about us? The answer is a surprising amount – and what they don’t know they often guess, eerily well.…

A partridge in a pear tree is nothing compared with the sight of an Egyptian goose (Alopochen aegyptiaca). The species is pictured in the tombs of the pharaohs – and perched 40 feet up on the branch of one of St James’s Park’s 200-year-old plane trees. It prefers to nest in holes found in old trees. The only other goose I have seen tree nesting – in the hollows of ten-foot-high pollarded oaks alongside a lake – was at Jonathan Minter’s prize-winning sporting estate in Constable country. Egyptian geese will also perch on buildings. In St James’s, a pair can often be seen standing sentinel on top of the Guards Memorial facing Horse Guards Parade, before flying off to land on the 20-foot-thick concrete roof of the nearby Admiralty Citadel…

The majority of adults believe they become better people as they grow older. So said the Harvard psychologist Daniel Schacter, in his excellent study The Seven Sins of Memory (2001). But that process, he adds, requires us to mark down our younger selves. Or – worse – to rewrite who we were in order to fit with who we have become. In one scientific study in 1960s America, teenagers were asked, ‘Is religion helpful to you?’ Some 70 per cent replied ‘yes’. Thirty years later, the same teenagers were asked the same question but put in the past: was religion helpful to you at the age of 15? Only 25 per cent said ‘yes’. Those who had become atheists could not believe their youthful credulity. It’s easy to compare ourselves…

I’ve never got the hang of hassocks – those hard square cushions so carefully embroidered with corn and grapes or sheep or coats of arms, and with names of local voluntary bodies. I suppose they are stuffed with horsehair – the hassocks, not the voluntary bodies. My knees mean a great deal to me, and they have to be kept from seizing up by careless kneeling, but hassocks have never been part of my tradition, as people these days call it. Hassocks often seem too thick, accommodating those who lean forward in prayer, their bottoms on the bench, their legs bent to meet the hassock at an angle. For me, kneeling means keeping the femur perpendicular and the knee on a low kneeler, softened, one hopes with more than a…

‘Wallet, keys, tickets, something to suck’ …the familiar checklist of the artsgoer. You may still go through this ritual, but nowadays with an impending sense of doom. At the start of the year, a poll of theatregoers of all ages by Purple Seven suggested the gloomiest group about their arts lives returning to normal this year were the over-70s – just 21 per cent could foresee a life sans masks, sans hand sanitiser, sans everything. Is it really that bad out there? Of course not, but who knows how fast things will return to the old normal; meanwhile, the new normal can turn on a sixpence. I advise Going Out as if it were a foreign holiday in pre-plague days. The tickets Many venues now prefer ticketless online ‘e-tickets’. But…

A lot of folk smell spring and ask me: ‘How hard is it to keep bees? I want bees!’ I reply that it is easy…but if you fail to prepare then prepare to fail. Preparations must begin well before you start to smell the honey. I like to think about it as the rule of the BEEEs: bees, education, equipment and environment. Bees The oldest bee fossil dates from about a hundred million years ago and bees can manage happily without us – unless you want a little bit of rent in the form of honey. In that case, it’s time to get educated. Courses Most practical courses – and they don’t have to be expensive – run between January and May, though there are online ones too. Each county…

‘Reckless’ drivers exchange sandwich on M90 Dundee Courier Delayed opening as leak discovered at new Ripon pool Harrogate Advertiser Mum ‘overwhelmed’ with response to new hairthickening clinic Lancashire Telegraph £15 for published contributions NEXT ISSUE The Spring issue is on sale on 6th April 2022. 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 2022 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 UP box.…

On the seafront in Deal, Kent, stands a tall tower topped by a mast with a large, black ball. This is a time ball tower, once used by ships offshore in the English Channel to set their chronometers accurately, essential for calculating longitude at sea – an early GPS system. Time balls were erected around Britain and the world; only a handful remain. In 1818, Captain Robert Wauchope had the idea of having a large signal in ports that would at a specific moment give the exact time. In 1829, after extensive campaigning, the Admiralty agreed to the erection of the first time ball in Portsmouth. This was followed by one at the Greenwich Observatory in 1833. In Greenwich at 12.55pm, a red wood-and-leather ball would rise halfway up the…

Early one morning in January 1971, a young film director sat waiting nervously with a skeleton film crew in a sitting room on Mulholland Drive. Everyone was silent – the target of their mission, they had been told, did not like noise. A camera had been set up, a few bits of prosciutto and cheese placed on a table. Finally, the owner of the house entered, wearing a long Japanese robe. Without acknowledging anyone, he sat down. As the camera began to whirr, he tied his long, blond hair up in a pigtail, applied black shoe polish to it and filled his cheeks with cotton wool. ‘This man is a bulldog,’ he murmured to himself, with a strange, hoarse rasp. Muttering wordlessly, he picked at the food, stared up at…

Travel bans were lifted only recently. Yet many of our gung-ho friends have already clocked up not only ski holidays but also trips to Lamu, the fashionable Kenyan island. None of the tropical travellers seemed to mind that the majority went down with Omicron on arrival in Lamu and most of the skiers shrugged off catching it on the plane back from Switzerland. It was just ‘par for the course’, they said. Green with envy, I am desperate for a change of scene. For professional reasons, a four-day Eurostar break (with the family) is the only possibility – but something is preventing lift-off. It’s the planning. Mary and her spad (as she calls her young secretary) refuse to help me since it’s ‘my project’ and they are too busy with…

I am becoming increasingly obsessed with Nadine Dorries – so much so that I’m rather hoping she gets the education brief next time. The euphoria at the leaving of ‘Sir’ Gavin has faded, and Nadhim Zahawi has not yet really done anything either to raise or to lower my blood pressure. But Nadine? Well, she is a gift that just keeps giving. If you judge by social media, I am not alone in my fascination for the lovelorn gazes of our Culture (shurely shome mishtake, Ed) Secretary at her Leader. But her latest announcement, as I write, makes us all crave her as our professional leader. In defending the Downing Street parties, or gatherings – call them what you will – she insisted Downing Street was ‘an office, it’s a…

The former Bishop of London, Lord Chartres, gave the address at the Chapel Royal, Hampton Court Palace, for the funeral of Elizabeth Maclean. The chatelaine of Duart Castle on the Isle of Mull, she was married to Sir Chips Maclean, head of the clan and Chief Scout. Later becoming Lord Maclean, he was the Lord Chamberlain, running the Duke of Windsor’s funeral and Charles and Diana’s wedding. Lady Maclean ended her days in a large grace-and-favour house at Hampton Court. ‘She was getting ready for church when death came to her,’ said Lord Chartres. ‘Napoleon said you couldn’t hope to understand someone until you knew what the world looked like when that person was 20. In 1943, Elizabeth was already married and she was a mother. The wedding had been…

For as long as I have been a journalist, I have been a regular follower of Newsnight, the BBC’s nightly flagship current-affairs show. God knows how many thousands of hours I have watched, slumped on the sofa, not infrequently with a glass of wine to see me through. Although, like many of Auntie’s works, sometimes guilty of left-wing bias, the programme was for a long time authoritative and informative. The rot set in when Jeremy Paxman left in 2014 after 25 years as its main presenter. Paxo was often infuriating but he imbued Newsnight with a sense of importance. Grown-up politicians flocked to its studio to be eviscerated. What a pale shadow of its old self it has become! Government ministers seldom bother to turn up these days. The nightly…

My screen life has turned into Groundhog Day. Last month, I reviewed The Gilded Age, in which Bertha Russell, aspirational wife of a robber baron, tries to break into the inner sanctum of Manhattan high society. This month, I’m reviewing Inventing Anna (Netflix), which is about the exact same thing. Except that, while Bertha is being shunned by the Daughters of the Revolution, Anna Sorokin, AKA Anna Delvey, achieved her goal in a few laughably easy moves and is now doing time for grand larceny. Based on an article for New York magazine by Jessica Pressler, Inventing Anna begins with the disclaimer ‘This story is completely true. Except for all the parts that are completely made up.’ The joke is, of course, that everything about Anna Delvey, a penniless 25-year-old…

BISCUITS V COOKIES For a mouthful of sunshine on a damp spring day, raid the cookie jar or stick your hand in the biscuit tin. The difference between a cookie and a biscuit is that the first is chewy, squidgy and American, while the second is crisp, snappy and English. As a general rule, soft brown sugar delivers squidgy and chewy; hard white sugar gives crisp and snappy. A cookie is cooked when the edges are browned, the middle still pale. A biscuit should be firm and browned all over and crisps as it cools. Biscuits keep for ever in an airtight tin and taste best when dipped in something hot and wet. Cookies are best eaten warm, and stay fresh for a week or two in a sealed box…

WOMEN’S CRICKET Back in 1998, a member of the MCC objected to the idea of women’s being allowed to join him in the Lord’s pavilion on the basis that, were they granted access, ‘the Long Room would resound to the clattering of teacups’. Hardly the most alarming of prospects. I know this happened because I’ve been round a new exhibition at Lord’s charting the evolution of women’s cricket. And for an old bloke like me, it is a chastening experience – because what I didn’t know before is that women were playing cricket almost from the time it was codified. The first recorded match between ‘11 maids of Bramley and 11 maids of Hambledon’ was reported in the Reading Mercury in 1745. Apparently, the report continues, ‘the girls bowled, batted…

How do you look after your voice when travelling? I really have refined my position from being worried about everything as a young singer – this pillow is wrong; I’m feeling allergic to something; it’s too dry – to scarcely ever thinking about it. I don’t eat in restaurants very much unless they’re quiet. I stay hydrated and that’s about it. How has your voice changed as you’ve got older? It’s more comfortable in the top, but on the other hand I’m choosing repertoire that is a wonderful fit. At the Met next year, I’m doing a new opera composed for me which is really quite high. Certainly, stamina isn’t what it was 15 years ago and I have to be very careful about tessitura. Do you find you can’t…

We all know the story of Lazarus of Bethany, whom Jesus raised from the dead four days after his entombment, the last of the miracles (according to the gospel of John). Given the diamond blockage on this month’s lovely conundrum, the North dummy hand appears to be in a similar moribund state. West leads the king of hearts and you duck. You win West’s queen of hearts continuation (unable to afford a second duck). Take over the reins and see if you can resurrect the dummy. Remember, the bidding has marked East with all six missing spades. Dealer East Both Vulnerable (1) Weak two. (2) Settles for game as North could have nothing. Crucially for notrumps, he holds a stopper in East’s spades. Swap the queen and knave of spades,…

Climate anxiety Q I’m worried about my grandson. He’s 11 years old and every time he comes to see me he gets terribly upset. He’s so anxious about climate change and is convinced the world is going to end. I have tried to reassure him, but it’s not helped by his parents who are very eco-minded and don’t seem to worry about the effect it’s having on him. His school thinks he should see a psychiatrist, but it’s taking ages to get an appointment, and in the meantime he is suffering so much. How can I help him? B F, Derby A Your grandson is suffering from a very common condition among children, particularly boys for some reason, of that age. It’s called separation anxiety. When he was around 12 my…

Okay, I admit, I screamed. At the other end of her lead Tatty was finishing off the biggest, fattest rat since the Black Death. Owning a dog turns out to be quite eventful. That was her third rat to be notched up alongside the multitudinous other vermin and game she has despatched in her short life. I had pictured myself strolling through the countryside with faithful hound padding alongside. It hasn’t been like that at all. It’s more like being with an endlessly curious, easily distracted, hyperactive toddler with astonishing physical capabilities. There are breeds that produce militarily-obedient animals, but Tatty is a Lakeland terrier and there’s only so much direction they’ll accept. It amounts to Sit! (‘Okay, there’s a treat here’) and sometimes Come! (‘I might, if what I’m…