Indholdsfortegnelse for June 2022 i The Oldie

To use this TPCASTT method I’m unableJargon, jargon everywhere, nor any tiger burningA poem etherised upon a table A pleasure-dome, a demi-paradise of fableSlithy toves and dappled things resist discerningTo use this TPCASTT method I’m unable This naming of parts, to mince and quince a labelConnotation, Attitude and Shift, the rags of learningA poem etherised upon a table Time’s winged chariot rusts unburnished in the stableThe body electric fritzed by credit-earningTo use this TPCASTT method I’m unable Bent double, knock-kneed, my mind unstableNevermore! Rage, rage against the churningA poem etherised upon a table Ignorant armies will the bee-loud glade disableLeaden-eyed despair is fast returningTo use this TPCASTT method I’m unableA poem etherised upon a table.…

Knowing the author to be a shining beacon of male inadequacy with so little about which to brag, that mythical beast ‘the regular reader’ will indulge this one tiny boast. Not once in my 58 and a half years on this wretched planet have I received a conviction for public indecency. I might have done, on reflection, had a neighbour grassed me up to the Feds that May evening in 1981 when I streaked 100 yards down the road to wrap my Spurs scarf round a letter box in honour of the FA Cup Final replay victory, facilitated by Ricky Villa’s miraculous dribble through the Manchester City defence. But either nobody witnessed it, or those who did – having no access to the yet-unbuilt Hubble Telescope – were unable to…

Goblin mode describes a deliberate embrace of slovenliness and squalor. When in ‘goblin mode’, a person spends as long as they possibly can indoors – ideally in bed in egg-stained loungewear. They will defer errands, decline invitations, spurn exercise, wave away deadlines, and spread peanut butter on a packet of Frazzles and call it dinner. At 4am. As self-confessed ‘goblin’ and Internet-user Dave McNamee explained to the Guardian: ‘It’s about a complete lack of aesthetic. Because why would a goblin care what they look like? Why would a goblin care about presentation?’ The term emerged from the Internet message board Reddit in the late ’00s. Goblin mode, it has been suggested, is part of a wider ‘vibe shift’ against contemporary wellness culture, with its demands to look and feel wonderful…

In Children Leaving Home, a poem written at the end of his life for his two younger offspring, Tamasin and Daniel, the Anglo-Irish Poet Laureate Cecil Day-Lewis (1904-72) posed the question ‘What shall I have to bequeath?’ His dispirited answer was ‘a sack of genes/I did not choose, some verse/Long out of fashion, a laurel wreath/Wilted…’ Time has proved him wrong. Half a century on from his death on 22nd May 1972, that same sack of genes has seen Daniel become the only three-times winner of the Oscar for Best Actor. Meanwhile, Walking Away, written after he dropped off his elder son, Sean, at school – with the resonant final lines, ‘selfhood begins with a walking away/ And love is proved in the letting go’ – is on the GCSE…

Many people yearn for a Press that is fairer and more balanced. They deprecate partisanship, and sometimes admiringly point to supposedly more even-handed American newspapers. Yet it is the outrageous partiality of British publications, especially the tabloids, that often leads to light being shone into the murkier recesses of our political life. Partygate and Beergate are two cases in point. The Daily Mirror broke Partygate. It believes Boris Johnson is a liar, a scoundrel and an awful human being. It guns for him at every opportunity. When Dominic Cummings was still the apple of the PM’s eye, the paper combined with the Guardian in May 2020 to reveal that the errant chief adviser had breached COVID regulations by undertaking a jaunt to Barnard Castle. Without the Boris-hating Daily Mirror, we…

It is impossible to know where obsessions start. Was it as I first practised my own teenage signature in curly script, exaggerating the swoop of the ‘y’? Or first turned the pages of a book on Giotto in my local library? Or carefully calligraphed and illustrated all the poems in Yeats’s early volume The Rose as a gift for my new husband? By then, I was 22 and fatally mesmerised by the glitter of ornate initials, rich blue and red pigments, and the hypnotic swirls of acanthus in wide, riotous margins. My English degree required the study of Anglo-Saxon, Early Middle English and Later Middle English and I became entranced by reproductions of manuscripts in my textbooks. What hand made those marks on animal skin? Who read the words aloud…

Deal in Kent has been nominated as ‘one of the best places to live’ in the United Kingdom for the third consecutive year, according to a survey in the Times. The town has transitioned from being a rather rough resort back in the 1950s – natives remember brawls in the now dinky Middle Street – to a hipster’s ideal. Not all Dealites welcome the transformation. ‘I used to meet so many people I knew when I went down the High Street, ’ a neighbour lamented. ‘Now I hardly know a soul.’ But that is the way things are. Places alter, new residents arrive and a certain neighbourly familiarity is lost. The average price of a house – £334,896 – also prompts social change. Yet Deal has had some rum residents…

Twenty years ago, I had a short, pithy and productive altercation with the late Sister Wendy Beckett (1930-2018), the art commentator, while I was cleaning her bathroom. She lived in a caravan in a wood near our monastery. I mentioned casually that I thought it was about time I gave a talk to the community. W: I dare say it is. T: I’ve got nothing to say at the moment. W: Then talk about nothing. And don’t try to show off by giving a well-composed piece. Just stress that a nun chooses to live with nothingness. Our Lord had something to say about this. He is our life and we are left with this residual nothingness. We are given to God in recollection. That is the root of all love,…

SILLY DRINKING GAMES We’re about to embark on the best time of year for watching live sport. Or so conventional wisdom has it. Wimbledon, the Open, Henley, the British Grand Prix, Ascot, the Derby and half a dozen test matches will follow one another at a gallop in a glorious procession of sun, strawberries and wonderful outfits. Not forgetting the drink. Gallons of it. Because, for thousands of us Brits, this is less the start of a summer of sport, more a season on the booze. It is one of the enduring ironies of our unmatched sporting traditions that they are pickled in alcohol. Well, not so much those taking part. The men and women we go to watch whack balls, drive cars, ride horses and row boats avoid the…

There are two ways of looking at private health care – either it enables wealthy people to jump the queue or it is a way to take pressure off the struggling NHS. Whatever you think, private treatment is becoming common. To avoid waiting in pain for months, patients are using money not spent on holidays during lockdown to pay for operations. Others are borrowing from family or are even crowdfunding so they can be seen as soon as possible. And the NHS is sending patients to private hospitals to help clear the backlog. In many cases, you have the legal right to choose where you have NHS treatment, including in one of the private hospitals that provide services to the NHS. A merging of the NHS and private treatment had…

Anne Robinson (p19) has left Countdown ‘to make way for an older woman’. She was on The Weakest Link. She hopes to become a dutiful Cotswolds housewife even though, for obvious reasons, she isn’t married. Nigel Havers (p25) was in Chariots of Fire, A Passage to India and Empire of the Sun. He starred in The Charmer. He has been in Downton Abbey and Coronation Street. Jamie Blackett (p30), a former army officer, farms in Dumfriesshire. He writes for the Daily Telegraph and Country Life. He wrote The Enigma of Kidson, Red Rag to a Bull and Land of Milk and Honey. Bel Mooney (p32) is a novelist, children’s author, broadcaster and journalist. She is the advice columnist at the Daily Mail. She lives halfway between Bath and Bristol and,…

It was a peculiar sort of start to the century’s greatest political scandal, 50 years ago. Initially dismissed as a ‘third-rate caper’, the June 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington DC’s Watergate building mushroomed into a full-scale constitutional crisis. Two years later, it saw the resignation of President Richard Nixon. The problem lay not so much in the original offence as in the bungled attempt to cover it up. An immediate apology from the White House and a few tactical firings might have saved Nixon. The burglary attempt was botched when an unarmed security guard bumped into five men, three of whom turned out to be anti-Castro Cuban refugees, prowling around the building after midnight. They were wearing dark clothes and rubber surgical gloves to avoid…

I first went to see Paul McCartney on 14th September 1966, in the house he’d recently moved into, a Georgian gem in St John’s Wood. That was a surprise in itself. John and Ringo – young lads, new to London, new to untold wealth – had moved to the suburbs into mock-Tudor mansions on an estate in Weybridge, Surrey. They thought, ‘This is posh. This is what you do, as lads from the North.’ George got it even more wrong – he had moved into a horrible modern bungalow in Esher, also in Surrey. But Paul was ahead of the game, realising inner London was the place to live, in a period house, among the affluent and upmarket, arty, intellectual folk. In his house, I noticed a Magritte above the…

‘Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the charmer himself…’ ‘The charmer’ – these words have preceded my entrance to absolutely everything for the last 35 years, thanks to my appearance in the TV show of that name, which started in 1987. Every actor complains of being typecast – sexy, baddie, mother-in-law, you name it. Actors constantly have a beef about some description or other. So I suppose being known for being charming isn’t really such a bad rap. But what exactly is charm? Is it hereditary? Can you manufacture it? Can it be turned on and off like a hot tap? Smarmy, slippery, oily – these adjectives can all be applied when the charm tap isn’t running fully up to temperature and the object is either trying too hard, or just…

Until I discovered journalism, I was convinced farming was the worst-paid job of all. And it seemed inevitable it would always be so. The raw economics of globalisation and the boundless ingenuity of agricultural technologies – mechanical, chemical, biotechnical and now digital – seemed destined to drive the price of food ever lower. Thomas Malthus’s dire prediction – that the world’s population will grow to the point where eventually we will all run out of food – was already looking shaky. It has been finally demolished by the invention of laboratory food, which can be grown from stem cells and yeast cultures. As the last people who remembered eating Woolton pies started dying off, it seemed no one would fuss about the UK’s food security ever again. The reality of…

A friend of mine was mugged recently in Central Park. He and a friend visiting from France were wandering along the bridle path in one of the park’s more genteel stretches, near John Lennon’s old building, the Dakota. Two men stepped out of the shadows and demanded their wallets and phones. The American handed over his iPhone, the Frenchman his sustainably made Fairphone. The criminals pocketed the iPhone and smashed the Fairphone to pieces, not believing for a minute the Frenchman’s bleating that it was a real phone – just better for the planet. Sustainability is not yet a thing for New York’s criminal underclass. Once their assailants had gone, the victims ran and found someone who called the police. Within minutes, there were a dozen cars, lights flashing, sirens…

What does your ideal pub look like? Many of you will remember George Orwell’s imaginary tavern. He called it The Moon Under Water in a 1946 article in the Evening Standard. It had good beer, no piano, simple food, an open fire, barmaids who called you ‘dear’ and a solid Victorian vibe. Children were welcome and, oddly to us, beer was served in pink china mugs. It seems that in 1946 such pubs were rare, and Orwell says he didn’t know of one. Well, if Orwell fast-forwarded to 2022, I reckon he’d be pleasantly surprised by the state of British pubs, and the influence his essay has had. Everywhere you go, pubs seem to get better. They generally serve good beer and simple food and do not have music. And,…

The mood in my trenches is particularly grumpy at the moment. I pride myself on not complaining about new initiatives, but the latest brilliant wheeze has properly riled me. With levels of literacy falling, in part because of school closures, schools are scrabbling for ‘catch-up ideas’. My ideas – libraries, reading lessons etc – are obviously too old-fashioned. The problem is real. I’d like to think everyone (without a learning difficulty) arrives at secondary school able to read, but this is not the case. Though I think it is neither really my job, nor my skill, to teach people to read, these students need extra help. I remember losing my temper with the sainted head at my first school when I told him that, however high our percentage of GCSE…

In 1973, I was working backstage at Her Majesty’s Theatre in London on the musical Applause. Most people will remember it as the stage version of the Bette Davies film All About Eve (1950). Lauren Bacall was the star of the show. I used to see Miss Bacall coming off stage every night. For a young aspiring actor, to be so close to Humphrey Bogart’s wife was a privilege. She certainly had all the charisma and confidence of the old Hollywood school. I used to love the way she spoke to the deputy stage manager in that husky tone of hers, when she came off stage, with remarks such as ‘That man in the pit, he’s a disaster!’ I never found out what the problem was between her and the…

Sceptre £20 Melvyn Bragg is our greatest living Cumbrian – even bigger than haulage king Eddie Stobart. Like Wordsworth, Melvyn is Cumbrian born and bred, and has never really left Lakeland or stopped loving it. He is now a national treasure, loved by all, especially Radio 4 listeners. I am in awe at the way he handles those academics on In Our Time and his ability every week to mug up on a totally different and awfully erudite subject. His life peerage, unlike that of so many recipients, is well deserved. I don’t know anyone who does more for the arts than Melvyn. My wife, Margaret Forster, and I, also Cumbrians, grew up in the big city of Carlisle, while Melvyn was brought up in Wigton, a small town ten…

Let’s talk about talking Why are the British, when they congregate, at ease only if they talk about the weather? A possible answer is that their education system values above all else reading, writing and arithmetic. I’ve always found that odd. It’s not just that only one of ‘the three rs’ actually starts with an r. It’s more that concentrating on this trio neglects the activity that occupies much more of our time than maths or the written word and is central to our ability to communicate. I’m talking about talking. Why aren’t we taught how to talk? I can hear a clatter of dissent. The weather’s jolly interesting. We talk about it because it’s uncontroversial, and we don’t want to give offence. Anyway, we chat about our health, and…

GLORIANA – FOR ELIZABETH I & II I have only the vaguest memory of where I was when President Kennedy was assassinated. I’ve almost no recollection of the Cuban Missile Crisis when nuclear Armageddon supposedly threatened. But I can still see my young self walking slowly down a dank tree-lined avenue on the morning of 6th February 1952, after the headmaster’s announcement that the King had died and there’d be no more school that day. Why I remember it quite so vividly has never been entirely clear. Is it because, as the years pass, the image has been refreshed by the recognition of just how momentous the occasion was? Not so much the end of one reign, but the inauguration of another under which it has been both a privilege…

CHEAPO MICHELIN MAN I always become anxious when I’m asked by someone I don’t know to recommend a restaurant. There are just too many variables, not least cuisine, décor and noise – and budget is the top trump. People invariably start off full of bravado by asking for ‘somewhere really nice’. There’s a pause while they watch me whirling through my mental Rolodex of delights before they land the killer qualifier – ‘but obviously not too expensive’. Then they get a little worried that I’ll send them somewhere dismal. So they recite meagre price ranges, in total denial that London has become more expensive since the last Lyons Corner House closed. So this has become my stock reply. Pick any one of the UK’s 105 Michelin Bib Gourmand restaurants, which…

It is now a popular refrain that the pandemic’s health and safety restrictions had an unforeseen effect: advancing contentment through a heightened awareness of nature. Taking an ‘awe walk’ is what a ‘happiness officer’ might suggest. Londoners certainly discovered the truth of Pitt the Elder’s remark, in the 18th century, that the ‘lungs of London’ are the parks. Only the ‘pandemonium’ forced me, like untold others, to explore the royal parks. And it was only a now much-missed friend who drew my attention to an unknown haunt of the reed warbler (Acrocephalus scirpaceus). Alister Warman, Director (1983-91) of the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens and last Principal (1991-2003) of the Byam Shaw School of Art, died from cancer in May 2020. He was a bird-loving walker from boyhood. His last…

As you drive along a long, rough woodland track in Warwickshire, it is a surprise and a half to come upon Wellesbourne Bath House. It is a little, elegantly neat, neoclassical building in the midst of the trees. Graceful and temple-like, it was created in 1748. Step through the door and you are surrounded by surprises. Rocks are fashioned into pillars and arches. They seem to drip from the ceiling in abundance, too. Those rocks are designed, if you please, to show off a handsome yet icy plunge pool. Your next surprises are the great sweeps of an octagonal, domed ceiling with a wealth of plaster icicles, radiating from a central cluster. On the walls hang eight-foot-long thick swags of larger shells, tied up with plaster bows. You then descend…

When you picture a great watershed between two rivers, a mountain ridge probably comes to mind – not a reedbound marsh barely 20 yards above sea level. But Redgrave and Lopham Fen is a miraculous, albeit low-key place. This hidden fen is the source of both the River Waveney, which flows 59 miles east to join the sea at Great Yarmouth, and the Little Ouse, which flows 37 miles mostly west to the Great Ouse and then north into the Wash. The spring power beneath one modest marsh turns the county of Norfolk into an island. I was seeking the magical point where the map marks ‘Source of the Little Ouse’ and ‘Source of the River Waveney’. I was abuzz with the riddles of this quest. How can this spot…

In most walks of life, one plus one equals two. Sometimes at the bridge table, one plus one can equal one. Dealer South Neither Vulnerable The bidding (1) Splinter bid looking for a heart slam, showing club shortage. In truth, a tad optimistic facing a weak raise. (2) North’s hand is HUGE in context. He has the perfect holding opposite a splinter – length with no wasted pictures. He has a working ace and king. And he has the fourth trump. West led the knave of spades and declarer thanked North for his dummy. ‘Looks as if we need a two-two heart split, ’ he decreed. Declarer won the spade in hand and cashed the ace-king of hearts, East discarding a spade. ‘Drat, ’ he said. He crossed to the…

IN COMPETITION No 280 you were invited to write a poem called Cutting. My cue was a 19th-century Norwegian painting I’d seen of a woman cutting bread. You widened it to cutting hair and grass, being cut down to size and cutting people dead in the street. Philip Machin praised the railway cutting: ‘Brunel knew well the weeks of toil, / The lines of navvies digging soil, / The horse-drawn carts removing spoil, / That made the gap at Sonning.’ Mrs Pat Castle described the cutting out of her mother’s wedding dress in 1945, with material bought by friends’ pooled ration coupons. Fay Dickinson told of an annoying husband cutting corners and ending up cutting his finger. Commiserations to them, Peter Murawski, Vic Cole, D A Prince, Sue Smalley, Katie…

What is your first recollection of the Queen? Mine dates back to Coronation Day, 2nd June 1953. I am five and sitting on my father’s shoulders, in the rain in the middle of the crowd in the Mall, holding onto to his forehead with one hand while trying to manage my folding Palitoy periscope with the other. The periscope, made of cardboard and tin mirrors, was designed to let you see over the heads of a crowd, but when I peered into mine all I saw was a murky reflection of my own face. I don’t think we had assembled the contraption quite right. I do remember the gold Coronation coach trundling past and the cheering of the crowds. And I remember seeing the young Queen’s face in pale grey…

British Restaurants were public dining rooms offering price-capped, nutritious meals to people in the 1940s and 1950s. You may associate canteen dining with the reek of cabbage and the misery of wet trays, but these sites were designed to be ‘centres of civilisation’. The name was coined by Prime Minister Winston Churchill in 1940. Churchill thought the Ministry of Food’s preferred title – Communal Feeding Centres – was redolent of Dickensian poverty or Soviet monotony. The British Restaurant had been pioneered in the First World War as the ‘National Kitchen’ and the goal remained the same: to combat food- and fuel-price inflation and boost morale, the state would subsidise attractive, yet cheap, urban social-eating spaces. After receiving a start-up grant from the Treasury, local government was responsible for recruiting a…

In the Cotswolds, nearly four decades ago, my then husband would stand in the bedroom half-dressed on a Saturday evening wailing, ‘Do you think it’s a blazer do or a cardie do?’ We were arrivistes but not entirely stupid. We knew that in the Coln Valley – or Sin Valley, as it was then widely known – it mattered not too much whose spouse you borrowed for the afternoon, or had on permanent loan. Yet it mattered very much that you knew your Gucci loafers from your tasselled Trickers. Kitchen supper for the girls meant pie-crust collars, burgundy fine tights, miniskirts, lashes of slap and loads of gold chains. We once sailed into a Gloucestershire drawing room for dinner, for the same ex-husband to find he was the only male…

Oldies of a certain vintage may remember when the sight of an unadorned male head was remarkable. Men’s hats were everywhere, as any old film or newsreel will amply demonstrate. Throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th, a gentleman leaving home without a hat, while the sin was not quite on a par with omitting to pull on his trousers, would still occasion censorious comment. He would be seen to be improperly dressed. This convention had to do less with protection from the elements than with the necessary demonstration of class, rank and manners. Men’s clothes pretty quickly informed you what sort of person you were dealing with; the hat alone was an instant and infallible indicator. The cloth cap was indelibly associated with the working classes. This…

In the past, texts of a religious or improving nature hung on every cottage wall. Victorian needlework-samplers might typically remind the occupants to ‘Honour thy father and thy mother’. Thence to basements in the pot-smoking 1970s, where posters of the saccharine poem Desiderata (‘Go placidly amid the noise and haste’) seemed to endorse the passivity of the ‘basementals’ gazing on. As a teenager, I was very taken with the description of such texts in a fictional household within a world paralysed by genetic mutation. In The Chrysalids by John Wyndham, the narrator describes his family home: ‘The nearest approach to decoration was a number of wooden panels with sayings, mostly from Repentances, artistically burnt into them. KEEP PURE THE STOCK OF THE LORD… ‘Frequent references to these texts had made…

● The English words skin, nice, science, insect and segment all derive from the Proto-Indo European root sek, ‘to cut’. ● The skin of a Panamanian golden frog contains enough toxin to kill 1,200 mice. ● The skin is the largest organ in the human body. It makes up about 15 per cent of the body’s weight and is about 20 square feet in area. ● Depending on your size, your skin weighs 10-15lb. ● The skin of a hippopotamus weighs a ton. ● Each square inch of human skin has 65 hairs, 650 sweat glands, 1,300 nerve endings, 9,500,000 cells, 19 yards of blood vessels and 78 yards of nerves. ● Nobody knows exactly how many holes there are in human skin. There are an estimated 2-5 million hair…

‘If you are idle, be not solitary, ’ said Doctor Johnson, ‘and if you are solitary, be not idle.’ As usual, the Great Cham of literature was right, even though he was not a doctor. He was, however, very interested in the medical science of his time and actually performed physiological experiments on himself. Medical attention has recently been drawn to the ill-effects of loneliness, a blight that is said to be increasing. Of course, it is undesirable in itself, irrespective of its medical harms. If, per impossibile, it were found that loneliness were good for you in the strict medical sense, should we extol it? A recent paper reported on the follow-up for ten years of over 2,000 people with an average age of 73. About one in seven…

Fifty years ago, on 30th May 1972, I was on duty at BBC Radio London when we learnt about a devastating accident in south London. Battersea’s Big Dipper, packed with 31 riders, began its ascent of the initial incline. Seconds later, it hurtled back down. Three children were dead. Sixteen were seriously injured, with two more to die in subsequent weeks. Battersea Fun Fair was part of the 1951 Festival of Britain on London’s South Bank, where the Skylon enthralled young baby boomers. Two miles upstream was the fairground. Both sections were planned to last for one year. In autumn 1951, the South Bank was stripped but the Pleasure Garden gained an extension. Sadly, in 1952 crowds diminished, but a third year was sanctioned and numbers increased, as directors Sir…

Bloomsbury £18.99 Should Dame Sheila Hancock come stomping towards you, perhaps on the Hammersmith towpath, steer clear. Declaring in her new book ‘I am a grumpy old woman’ and ‘I am by nature aggressive’, which is odd for a Quaker, she reveals that the past few years have seen her ‘in turmoil’ because ‘misery has swamped my brain’. The chief problem, next to automated ticket barriers that won’t open, rude airport officials and the prospect of £106 billion utterly wasted on HS2, is Brexit. As Hancock reminds us, 51.89 per cent voted to leave, 48.11 per cent voted to remain – which was hardly an appreciable margin – and 30 per cent of the adult population didn’t bother to vote at all. Hancock has long kept a home in France,…

Michael Joseph £30 You can tell Christian Wolmar is really keen on trains when he enthuses about the ‘acrid burning smell’ the brakes used to make on the Seventies 125s. He found it ‘not entirely unpleasant’. The problem took 15 years to sort out. Extraordinary details keep breaking in on the half-century of Britain’s nationalised railways, 1948-97. The book might have been dry, had the author kept to his declared aim of showing how British Railways’ ‘reputation has been traduced by those who sought to break it up’. Wolmar, a long-time railway journalist and Labour politician, leaps to defend the British Rail sandwich, which he denies was curly, and was in any case saved by Prue Leith and shrink-wrap. But even if those sandwiches were as fresh as new-mown cress,…

Complicated game shows Whatever happened to straightforward TV quizzes, such as Double Your Money? A weekly highlight. Hughie Green would gush, ‘I mean that most sincerely, folks, ’ and gently tease the contestants. Now we’re bombarded with endless, complicated game shows, often two or three times in one evening. ‘Not another one, ’ roars hubby. ‘Change the channel.’ Racking up the excitement is everything. ‘Let the battle begin, ’ bellows a hidden voice. Cue menacing drum rolls, a cave with blazing yellow flames – and a shadowy figure appears, like an evil warrior. Don’t panic. It’s only the resident expert clever clogs from The Chase. Many other shows have hyped-up presenters piling on the pressure. ‘Wotcha finkin?’ one yells. In the final round of another show, the hapless competitor had…

It is disturbing enough to listen to Start the Week and hear Russell Foster on circadian sleep patterns – followed by the story of the Sackler family’s evil drug OxyContin (Book of the Week). But have you tried Radio 4’s Lusus, where you’re immersed in a mad metaverse? You share the life of a ‘Gen Z Urbanite’ plagued by FOMO (fear of missing out). She wakes at 3.44am (always 3.44am) telling herself not to check her messages – ‘Everyone is sleeping’ – only to see a friend is posting from a business-class lounge, or lying by a pool with a lover and a cocktail. ‘Stop scrolling. There is nothing better happening anywhere else right now. Be in the moment!’ soothes Caroline Faber, the honeyed voice of the mindfulness narrator on…

GEORGIAN WINE ON MY MIND I first tried Georgian wines during a bizarre press trip to the breakaway Georgian republic of Adjara, in March 2004. Most of our party were election observers – the renegade president of Adjara, Aslan Abashidze, was desperately trying to cling on to power. I was there to write about Adjaran food and drink. I spent much of my time in a restaurant near the conference centre in Batumi, where Abashidze was making interminable speeches. I ate Adjaran khachapuri – wonderfully fresh, buttery cheese bread baked with an egg yolk inside – and drank chacha, Georgian grape-based vodka (the local wine was red, medium-sweet and undistinguished). My departure was delayed several times. I felt rather like the hapless William Boot in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, especially when…

What are your earliest childhood holiday memories? I come from the East End and we’d go to holiday camps and love it. There were fancy-dress and knobbly-knees competitions, and outmoded things like beauty pageants. We discovered camping in France when I was 12, and went to Spain when I was about 13. It was lovely discovering things with Mum and Dad. What is your favourite venue for musicals and ballet? Our home base is Sadler’s Wells and it’s unique in that it presents only dance. But we’re a touring company as well and we go to many lovely theatres. I’ve got a soft spot for the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, where I went as a teenager. The East End singalong feeling gave me a love of a certain type of…

Our dinner party nerves Q My wife and I have been invited to an indoor dinner party with around 15 guests. We are concerned about catching COVID, but would go if we knew everyone had had a negative lateral-flow test first. Our hosts have made no such request with the invitation and we wonder how to approach them about our concerns. If they say they are not prepared to ask their guests to self-test, we will decline the invitation – but we do not wish to fall out with our hosts. When we entertain indoors, we always ask our friends to test first and never have a problem, only comments that they will test but wouldn’t have done so otherwise. How do you suggest we deal with our dilemma? C Sanderson,…