Indholdsfortegnelse for January 2023 i The Oldie

Gyles Brandreth's Diary Flagellation has never really been a big thing with me. In fact, it's never been ‘a thing’ at all. I did go to a boys’ boarding school back in the early 1960s, but my kindly parents chose it specifically because the headmaster did not believe in beatings. In the 2010s, when Fifty Shades of Grey appeared and became the fastestselling paperback of all time, I heard it was about BDSM (bondage/discipline, dominance/submission) and thought I had better read it. I did. It's not very well written and, as far as I'm concerned, not much of a turn-on either. But what do I know? Nothing, it seems. The lucky author, E L James, has sold more than 150 million copies of her spanking bestsellers. They have been translated…

WHAT IS grey rocking? Grey rocking may sound like the kind of thing Neil Young does when he gets really into a guitar solo – but I'm afraid it isn't as exciting as that. It is, rather, a strategy for dealing with narcissists, attention-seekers and emotional abusers. Whatever they throw at you, you remain as calm as a grey rock – and soon they will crumble. Let's say the difficult person in your life announces over the phone that you are a terrible human being – and you ruined their life – and yes, they do intend to make a scene about it at Mark and Linda's wedding – and no, they will not let this drop. In response, you behave like an impassive grey rock. You don't cry, shout,…

In 1957, a 23-year-old Englishwoman called Jane Goodall boarded a ship bound for Kenya, to visit a friend who lived on a farm near Nairobi. It was her first trip to Africa; it was a journey that would change her life. In Kenya, Jane met the renowned paleoanthropologist Dr Louis Leakey. Impressed by her strength of character and her passion for wildlife, Leakey sent her to Tanzania to study chimpanzees. The pioneering research she did there transformed our understanding of those noble animals – and of ourselves. Living in close proximity to these extraordinary creatures, in a remote part of Tanzania, Goodall discovered that chimpanzees aren't vegetarians – they're omnivorous and hunt for meat. She found out, too, that they make and use tools. Above all, she established that they're…

My wife used to persuade me, when I was applying for a passport, to put ‘Fruit farmer’ rather than ‘Investment manager’ in the space for ‘Occupation’, though I was nothing of the sort. She didn't like the flavour of ‘Investment manager’. Next time I renew, I can with a clear conscience put ‘Working grandfather’ in there. And golly, it sure is work. I am delighted to see that Liz Truss is thinking of shelling out a modest fee to childcaring grandparents. Young mothers who look after children are far too busy to write articles about what hard work it is, and when they get older, they forget. So the subject doesn't get as much airing as it deserves. But circumstances have plunged me into the job. It's only part-time, because…

I was recently invited to direct Shakespeare's bizarre comedy in America. ‘Oh no, not another Twelfth Night.’ I've acted in it four times already. Never cot it right yet. First time, at school, in 1953, performing in the classroom. As an 11-year-old, I was already a fan of Richmal Crompton's William: ‘When I'm in a play, I like to have a lot to say, an’ a lot to do.’ Too right. Like Master Brown, I was prepared to give the playwright a chance: ‘I wrote a play once,’ said William, ‘and people acted it. They all forgot their parts, but it was a iollv fine nlav all the same.’ I decided that both Williams were pretty wonderful. I'd been entrusted with the part of Viola (who masquerades for reasons of…

’The moment this brilliant young producer started telling me about Doctor Who, I was hooked. I told her, “This is going to run for five years” – and look what happened!’ So said the first Doctor Who, William Hartnell, about Verity Lambert. 22nd November 2022 marked the 15th anniversary of her sad death in 2007, five days before her 72nd birthday. Let's nip back in time to 1963 (your TARDIS or mine?) and consider just what an impact a hitherto-unknown young woman made on television. Sydney Newman had just been recruited as a producer by the BBC from ABC Weekend Television, which provided service in the Midlands and Northern regions for the ITV network. He commissioned a new Saturdayevening science-fiction programme to be broadcast in weekly episodes. The idea was…

I f I were still at school, my worst nightmare would be to have to take maths in the sixth form. Sixty years after leaving, I still shudder at the very thought. I had no ability at the subject and wasn't even allowed to take it at O level. So to compel somebody like me to undergo two more years of hated maths lessons would have meant absolute torture; not just for me but for the poor teacher as well. Yet if Rishi Sunak has his way, he will make maths compulsory in all schools up to the age of 18. His reasoning is that in Germany, Asia and France, youngsters have to study maths to that age. He has even stated that, by allowing pupils to drop maths at…

Postcards from the Edge My elder brother Carlos was a pal of Paddy (real name Robert) Blair Mayne (1915-55) – one of the prominent SAS men in the BBC TV series Rogue Heroes. Back in the 1950s, they went carousing together around the many Dublin pubs. PBM was from a strict Presbyterian background, for which reason he would travel south at weekends to escape the austere Ulster Sabbath. He was a boozer, a killer warrior (he told my brother he had dispatched Germans in the desert with his bare hands) and a tormented homosexual, at a time when such relationships were criminal. But Dublin tended to be more easy-going, and had a gay subculture, centred in the Catacombs, and a famous gay pub, Bartley Dunne's. After a rambunctious evening, the…

• Most owls have a right ear larger than their left. • Owls can hear their prey under the earth. • If you look into an owl's ear, you can see the back of its eye. • Unlike most birds’ eyes, an owl's are on the front of its face, rather than at the sides. • Owls’ eyes are tubular and cannot move in their sockets. To make up for this, owls can turn their heads through 270° and nearly upside down without moving their body. • Owls have 14 cervical vertebrae, twice as many as humans and all other mammals except sloths and manatees. • Owls have specialised wings and feathers that allow them to fly in almost total silence. • An owl can fly within inches of its…

The Doctor's Surgery Is prevention always better than cure? It is worse than cure if it fails to prevent, for it both raises anxiety and costs money. In the case of mass screening, it is often not easy to decide whether the light is worth the candle. From time to time, I receive an ‘invitation’ to undergo a colonoscopy. So far, I have always turned it down; the test for occult blood in the stool is as far as I have gone. I have always told myself that my refusal of colonoscopy is based on the lack of scientific evidence that it is beneficial. But it's really because I do not like the idea. I am squeamish about it. It was with some selfish pleasure, then, that I read recently…

By Charles O'Brien, Ian Nairn and Bridget Cherry Yale £45 From start to finish, Charles O'Brien's revised Pevsner Guide to Surrey is a beautiful book – from the magnificent photograph on the front cover of Horsley Towers, designed by Byron's son-in-law, the Earl of Lovelace, in 1858, to the glossary and indexes at the end. The glossary is a joy in itself, with its eight pages of exquisite little architectural drawings of mouldings and windows and tracery, of pediments and domes and squinches and staircases. Published in 1962, the original Surrey was the first work in which Pevsner collaborated with Ian Nairn (1930-83), a young colleague whom he described as a born topographer. Bridget Cherry's revised edition appeared in 1971. The introduction to this volume includes a history of Surrey…

Londoners are loyal to their compass points. Anyone born and brought up in north London is likely to live, drink and dine in north London. We all converge on the West End, but few north Londoners will head into south or west London, and vice versa. It's not just about the length of the journey: the peoples of the four zones have different attitudes and expectations. We are cats; we have our territories in which we prowl, preen and hunt, and are very aware of their boundaries. Yet, as a west Londoner, working in the West End, I have found myself hunting further eastwards. I have been crossing the West End's invisible boundary of Kingsway into … EC1. Clerkenwell and Smithfield have opened their doors to me and there's even…

Stephen Vizinczey's bestselling novel In Praise of Older Women was published in 1965. It hasn't spawned successor volumes praising older men. Understandably and I'm not going to attempt one now. But I do think we should praise older cars. Not because they performed better, lasted longer or were more reliable, safer, more comfortable or more economical than their descendants. They rusted away within ten years, wouldn't start on cold mornings, overheated at speed and needed new plugs and points every 3,000 miles – or an engine rebuild after 50,000. How often now do your valves burn out or your ‘big ends’ go – remember that sickening knock on deceleration? But ‘older cars’ now include those of recent decades – the internationally-agreed definition of a classic is one that's at least…

Bill Knott writes: ‘My first real introduction to the wines and cuisine of Provence was in the mid-1990s from Keith Floyd, who was living near Avignon and had once owned a restaurant in L'Isle-sur-la-Sorgue. Floyd loved nothing better than a long lunch on the shady terrasse of a bistro, and I look forward to following in his footsteps once again.’ Bill has already chosen Mr Floyd's favourite restaurants. The holiday will offer a variety of markets, wineries, sites and museums but we will mainly be in search of pleasure. We will stay at Ménerbes, at the Domaine de la Suzoniére (www.location-avec-piscine-provence.com) which we will have entirely to ourselves, complete with cook and swimming pool. There will be plenty of time to relax at the villa, in the afternoons, looking up…

Martin Jarvis (p26) is the world master at recording P G Wodehouse and the Just William stories on the radio and on audiobooks. He appeared in The Forsyte Saga and Titanic. Bruce Beresford (p30) directed Breaker Morant, Don's Party and the Oscarwinning Driving Miss Daisy. His film The Adventures of Barry McKenzie stars Oldie columnist Barry Humphries (p39). Anna Pasternak (p54), a great-niece of Boris Pasternak, wrote Lara: The Untold Love Story That Inspired Doctor Zhivago. She is author of Princess in Love, about Princess Diana's affair with James Hewitt. Mark Ellen (p57) edited Smash Hits and The Word. He presented The Old Grey Whistle Test and co-presented Live Aid. At Oxford, he played bass alongside Tony Blair in the band Ugly Rumours.…

Grumpy Oldie Man It came as a shock recently to discover, in some long-abandoned cranny of this ravaged psyche, a residue of what felt like self-respect. Any epsilon male sunk deep into middle age, and deeper into irrelevance, has no business caring what others think of him. He simply assumes that, in so far as they think of him at all, they think of him with either contemptuous indifference or mild loathing. In this, they precisely mirror his feelings about himself. Yet a fragment from an ultra-rare party invitation – the previous one, from memory, was in celebration of Edward VlII's abdication – unleashed a torrent of appearance-related concern. Beneath the date, time, venue and reason (anniversary) came the scariest phrase in the language: ‘Black tie’, it read. Now there…

Paddington Bear THE OLDIE OF THE YEAR By royal appointment, this is Paddington's year. We had the judges’ lunch to choose the 2022 Oldies of the Year in late September, just a week after the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II. Even before we had chosen our starters, we had agreed that this would be a year when a salute to someone associated with Her Majesty might be appropriate. One of us (me) suggested honouring all the Queen's living ladies-in-waiting with a group award. But, according to our unwritten rules, we don't do group awards. (ATOOTY is not the George Cross; it's more the OM.) Someone else suggested honouring Terry Pendry, the late Queen's groom, but, looking him up, we found that he is only 72, which these days seems a…

Henry Marsh, now an oldie at 72, practised neurosurgery, the most prestigious and probably the most nerve-wracking of all medical specialties, for many years. Neurosurgery entails the bearing of what for most of us would be an intolerable burden of risk and responsibility; of no type of surgery is it more true that the surgeon should have the eye of a hawk, the heart of a lion and the hand of a lady. In addition to his work in the National Health Service, Henry Marsh undertook teaching and operative work in far less favourable conditions in Ukraine and Nepal, where countless people, both doctors and patients, now owe so much to him. All this would have been more than enough to fill any average human life with achievement, yet Henry…

At the age of 87, Alan Garner this year became the oldest writer ever to have a novel shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Treacle Walker, at only 15,000 words, is an Alan Garner classic, full of magic and strangeness and fairy tale. Though Garner tells stories that draw from a deep collective well of myth and legend, no one tells them quite like he does. He has created, as Sam Leith put it in the Telegraph, ‘a small universe charged with meaning. A glimpse of a world suffused with magic, of which our own day-to-day existence seems to be a flickering instantiation’. This is the small universe Garner has been creating since the 1950s, in novels inspired by a vast reading in folklore and myth and by the landscape of…

Mary Kittens Fashion Tips Well-crafted and well-tethered wigs, as I described in the July issue, can dramatically enhance a woman's appearance. It makes the head/body proportions better. But wig-wearing is a palaver, unless you are a professional beauty. So how do you increase the volume of your own natural hair? I have the answer. For years, my own hair never grew longer than to the upper rim of my bra cup. Then I received the following tip from David, a 30-year-old heterosexual male, of all people. ‘Never use hair-conditioner. Conditioners suppress growth.’ Regarding him anew, I no ted that his own incipient balding had gone into reverse. From the day I stopped using conditioner, my hair started racing thickly out of my head and even today will happily grow to…

The problem with old people is they often seem to be equipped with everything they need already. What do you buy the generation that has everything? What kind of present brings YOU the most pleasure when you open it? Something you would actually use, no doubt; something appealing, something you wouldn't have thought to buy for yourself, or even thought of at all. Not ties, chocolates or soap. With a bit of imagination it's possible to buy Christmas presents that won't be greeted with a weary sigh, a weak smile and a pained ‘Thank you, darling’. No one thinks they're old until they have one foot in the grave. But, well before that, there are many properly helpful gadgets and comforting luxuries we would all love. Start with the obvious:…

Like most motorists, I have often wondered unflatteringly about the man behind the speed gun. Do they get a buzz out of it? Or is it just a quota thing – fulfilling performance targets? Now I know, after enrolling as a community Roadwatch volunteer – to give it the official name. It happened after I'd helped two community officers to free an urban fox trapped in the garden of a London square. After congratulating me, they said I was just the kind of responsible citizen they were looking for to join their Roadwatch team. The idea is to release officers for other duties by recruiting London residents to cut down speeding in their neighbourhoods. There were 1,608 deaths in Britain in 2021 – and speed figured in 20 per cent…

Town Mouse Sometimes I feel a bit sorry for my country cousins. They may have fresher air than us city dwellers, but their choice of foodstuffs is extremely limited. They have their farm shops with their lonely chutneys and dirty carrots. There is the occasional box of six eggs sitting on a stone wall next to an honesty tin. There are overpriced sausage vendors such as Daylesford Organic, and the bland, refrigerated offerings of a Tesco superstore. All accessible only by motor car. But here in London town, we enjoy an infinite variety of exotic foodstuffs right on the doorstep. Just a few yards from my front door in west London, we have Sham Land, a supermarket brimming with specialities from beyond the Syrian sea. The sausages are not so…

Last Christmas, I received a lovely card of a hare against a snowy landscape. I kept it. The sender wrote that he had looked hard for a religious card, and apologised for sending what he thought was second best. If I looked carefully, I would find a little medieval church in the background, which was better than nothing. There is for me a great sadness in such a communication. Surely people should not have to try all that hard to find a representation of the birth or infancy of Jesus Christ in the time before Christmas. Thirty-odd years ago, I might have directed my friend to the card stall at the British Museum, and to a very satisfying reproduction of what was then thought to be a Rembrandt drawing of…

As cheerful as a leper bell. Simon Raven on Gore Vidal Repose ‘comes easy in a gloomy place’. Joseph Mitchell (1908-96) The ideal restaurant is one where I walk in and the food is already on the table. The waiter says, ‘I knew you were coming’ – he looked out of the window and saw me. The wine has been poured, there's no one else in the restaurant, and the waiter doesn't bother me while I'm eating to ask if everything is all right. Then I get up, still chewing (I've scoffed the lot in about 15 minutes), and, as I walk out, the waiter says, ‘We'll debit the money from your account – so no need to wait for change or worry about the tip.’ Ricky Gervais on the…

Media Matters Rupert Murdoch is hoping to buy the Spectator magazine. So I am informed by an excellent source. If he succeeds in prising the esteemed weekly from the Barclay family, it will mark the final stage for the press tycoon in his journey from outsider to accepted member of the establishment. When Murdoch arrived on our shores more than half a century ago, he unleashed a revolution in popular newspapers. First he acquired the News of the World, and quickly made it even more sensationalist and vulgar than it had been. Then he bought the ailing Sun and turned it into an enormously successful paper – perennially in a state of war with the powers that be, and boasting, to the distaste of some, bare-breasted Page Three Girls. The…

Richard Morrison, Times columnist, recently wrote about the 65th anniversary of the Today programme, which has lost 600,000 listeners in a year. Morrison tried listening for two hours, ‘a masochistic way to start the day’. He fondly recalled the 1960s, when his dad would fry spam butties for breakfast, to the sound of the still-new Today, ‘and everyone fell about when Jack de Manio called Yoko Ono “Yoko Hama, or whatever her name is” ‘. These days, Morrison prefers to hear Nick Ferrari on LBC or Times Radio, which, ‘in my wholly unbiased view, provides compelling listening’. I am less than compelled, in the mornings. But Times Radio's afternoon women, Jane Garvey and Fi Glover, are dependable draws, as is MariellaFrostrup – intelligent, pertinent, amused without gales of silly laughter.…

After the drought of last summer, it has been interes ting to recall which fruit and vegetables flourished and which did not. Thanks to a frost-free spring, we had a record crop of apples and quinces – but no plums. The raspberries suffered from lack of rain, while we had our first crop of ripe figs in 15 years. In the hedgerows, blackberries were plentiful, though small, and the red autumn berries – hips, haws and guelder rose – were a joy to see. Among the vegetables and herbs I have grown in the past year, successes were leeks, carrots, shallots, yellow beetroot, courgettes, coriander and climbing borlotti beans. French beans, however, were disappointing and runner beans an almost total failure. I wrote here three months ago that I had…

You might think that if two countries are at war, the fighting would always be pretty obvious. This isn't the case online. Plenty of online guerrilla warfare takes place, and virtual armies are being raised which don't even have to cross borders to engage the enemy. The key to this is, inevitably, the internet. Online cyber wars are not new, but activity has stepped up since the Russians invaded Ukraine. At their most visible, these attacks often use a technique called a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS). This involves overloading a website with a huge flood of simultaneous requests to look at the same page. All websites have this Achilles heel. They can handle only a certain number of viewers at any one time. If that is exceeded, the website…

You ruffled black blossom, You glossy dark wind. Your sort of gorgeousness, Dark and lustrous And skinny repulsive And poppy-glossy, Is the gorgeousness that evokes my most puzzled admiration. D H Lawrence, from Turkey-Cock Bird of the Month is confined to wild birds in Britain. Celebrating Christmas with the turkey is, we hope, an acceptable exception. In North America, its native land, the wild turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) thrives. Unlikeits 40 domestic hybrids, it is an agile flyer in its natural habitat of woods and wooded grassland. It needs trees for roos ting, which for safety it does communally. Habitat loss reduced numbers to 30,000 by the 1930s. Conservation has reintroduced it to Canada and it now flourishes in the previously alien western states of the USA. A population of seven…

On the Road Paddington is our Oldie of the Year for 2022. What's it like acting opposite Paddington – presumably you don't actually see him? Oh, I saw him – absolutely. And I get very cross with people who claim that he doesn't exist. It's like saying Father Christmas doesn't exist. It's true that sometimes he didn't come out of his trailer – if he had a headache brought on by having hit the marmalade a bit hard the night before. So sometimes an actress who was the same height as Paddington would walk through his scenes, and sometimes a stick with a bit of sticky tape at the height of his eyes would have to suffice. But by lunchtime it was usually the bear from darkest Peru gracing us…

It was very considerate of Mr and Mrs Eddis to have four children – the perfect number for our game. Charlie (South), Hugo (West), Harry (North) and Johnny (East) all play to a high standard – witness this deal from an online game. Dealer South Neither Vulnerable West led the singleton knave of hearts versus 5 ♠, declarer winningthe queen. By leading declarer's second suit, West had telegraphed his intentions. He planned to win the ace of spades, put his partner in with a diamond and score a heart ruff. Declarer needed to pull off a Scissors Coup, or as Ely Culbertson termed it in his Contract Bridge Red Book (1934), the Coup without a Name. At trick two, declarer cashed the ace of clubs. He then crossed to the…

IN COMPETITION No 287 you were invited to use given rhymes to make a poem in a game of bouts-rimés, popular since the 17th century and popular with you. The rhyme words came from ‘Death lies in wait for you, you wild thing in the wood’ by John Masefield, published in his collection Sonnets in 1916. They really provoked your imagination. Max Ross cleverly reworked Robert's Frost's snowy poem. John McTavish described a Lancaster bomber crashing. Sue Smalley told of a couple who, after a woodland encounter, shared a cigarette that started a forest fire. Commiserations to them and to Iris Bull, Judith Green, Anthony Young, Con Connell, Paul Elmhirst, Sue Dickie, Dorothy Pope and Teresa Charman, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the…

Taking a Walk I love a great northern city – and Newcastle must be England's greatest. It has an abundance of fine stone buildings, a proper river, most shops are bars and the shops that remain sell the cheapest toothpaste ever found on sale in the 21st century. To everyone's surprise, the city now even has a decent football team. Newcastle wooed me on a dank autumn day when I took a riverside walk from its big, bustling railway station to its tiny, tranquil city farm. Streets close to city stations are usually tatty, but Newcastle immediately propels you into avenues of honeyed stone terraces reminiscent of Bath. On elegant Grey Street and down Dean Street, Newcastle's thoroughfares buzzed with students – if young people in hoodies can buzz in…

Ask Virginia I want to be alone Q Just after my wife died, I met a widow in the village I live in and, to start with, we got on very well. Sex was great and we had interests in common. But soon she was spending rather too much time round at my house and now she's talking about selling her house and moving in properly. Everyone in the village assumes we're a couple and I'm always invited with her to things that I'd quite like to go to on my own. I don't think I've yet really grieved for my wife – and now I realise this woman is very different indeed and I resent her trying to take my wife's place. I feel so guilty, though. I'm happy…

Teacher drove over wedding dress in bizarre Boxing Day row Dunfermline Press Colindale pub wins big at the Loo of the Year Awards 2022 Edgware & Mill Hill Times Customer wielded Nutella jar at staff Dundee Courier £15 for published contributions NEXT ISSUE The February issue is on sale on 11th January 2023. GET THE OLDIE APP Go to App Store or Google Play Store. Search for Oldie Magazine and then pay for app. OLDIE BOOKS The Very Best of The Oldie Cartoons, The Oldie Annual 2023 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. HOLIDAY WITH THE OLDIE Go to www.theoldie.co.uk/courses-tours…

WHAT WERE community-service orders? Fifty years ago, on 2nd January 1973, Mr Justice James, who'd been the judge at the Great Train Robbery trial, made the first community-service order in the world, at Nottingham Crown Court. These orders are still issued today. That first order – 120 hours of service – was given to Peter, a university student and cannabis-supplier. I was the senior probation officer responsible for setting up community service in Nottinghamshire. It was a Home Office pilot scheme to test the viability of the sanction as an alternative to a shorter period of prison. Community service was the brainchild of a Home Office Advisory Council Committee, chaired by Baroness Wootton. She believed community service offered an offender the opportunity to undertake constructive activity in the community, gain…

The Duke of Kent became a first-time author in April, aged 86. His book, A Royal Life, has been reprinted twice and there are 12,000 copies out in the world. I had the privilege of collaborating with him on this, and it is the first time that a book of oral history has been published with the Royal Family copiously quoted, somewhat on the lines of George Plimpton's books on Edie Sedgwick and Truman Capote. Different voices move the story forward. The Duke's voice is predominant; we also hear from the Duchess, Princess Alexandra, Prince Michael, his three children and his three maternal cousins. This year also saw the Duke take part in his first podcast, released on Remembrance Sunday. This was part of the Commonwealth Poetry Podcast of Gyles…

Jeremy Paxman, known for his roasting skills as ‘Paxo’, cruised the British airwaves for 50 years, taking off at Radio Brighton in 1972, and landing this year in a brave and poignant film, Paxman: Putting Up with Parkinson's. He worked on Tonight, Panorama, Breakfast Time, Start the Week, Did You See…? and the Six O'clock News, reported on the Troubles from Belfast and, for a quarter of a century, gripped the nation as the dyspeptic star of Newsnight. In that guise, he famously asked Michael Howard the same question 12 times in a row. This was later revealed to be merely a response to the producer's frantic request in his ear to play for time because the next item wasn't ready. Jon Snow said Paxo's greatest strength was that he…

C hristmas, as portrayed in the Beano – oh, wonder of wonders! During its heyday in the 1950s and 1960s, when it was selling way over a million copies a week, I gorged upon this fabulous comic. The Beano and the Dandy – they came to form the twin pillars of this only child's schoolboy existence. That might sound just a tad sad, but actually it was quite endlessly joyous. These regular entrées into a world just crammed with so colourful an array of such attractive imps and chancers were a lifeline for me. It's rather amazing because the most memorable characters should have seemed merely alien and absurd to a prep-school boy in Hampstead: Dennis the Menace, Roger the Dodger, Minnie the Minx (the token girl – though what…

In 1983, younger, much poorer and between jobs, I was staying with a friend in Brixton to go to a second friend's photographic exhibition. I went and it was enjoyable. I met a lovely American lady who offered me a lift ‘home’. At the end of the street, I assured her it would be fine to drop me off. I could see my friend's house and it would have been hard for her to turn. We waved and I began walking the few yards to my friend's door. Suddenly a young man was right up beside me and a knife was pressing into my liver. ‘Your bag.’ I unslung it from my shoulder and handed it over. As he rifled through it, he withdrew the knife slightly and I turned…

Hello, possums! My old New Zealand bridesmaid Madge Allsop is transitioning. She has never been a stranger to hormonal imbalance, bless her. As far as I am concerned, she has been transitioning for as long as I have known her. Now, the artful minx has gone public. It is so typical of her to wait until it became fashionable. Don't get me wrong, possums. I yield to none in my abhorrence of transphobia. I am excessively transfriendly, and some of my best friends have been someone else at one stage of the game. But Madge has always been an attention-seeker. Wait for this! A few years ago, she pretended to be dead! Yes, she vanished, in fact. She had sneaked back to Palmerston North, her home town in New Zealand…

Country Mouse By courtesy of this exceptionally mild late winter, red admirals are floating by the cottage window. Mexican orange blossoms are flowering for the second time. And soon we will have scarlet nasturtium flowers to decorate the festive salad bowl. Winter sun streams through windows – but womenfolk turn up the heating anyway and, inexorably, their menfolk move forward to turn it down. And yet I have also turned down an invitation to a tropical paradise issued by my best man, Bongo, who is Africa-based. I can't admit to Bongo that a growing sense of caution has trumped my sense of adventure. But do I really want to spend a winter break on a dhow, sailing up the coast from Mombasa to Lamu and beyond? Motion sickness, the smell…

Sophia Waugh: School Days The Cupcakes and Classics group gathers one lunchtime a week, overseen by my head of department and me. We read classics, old and new, with clever children. They are mostly girls, although a couple of boys have infiltrated. One is only 12, with a humorous, clever face. The other is one of my Year 11s, who plays an imaginary piano on his desk instead of concentrating on Macbeth and is enthralled by the Shakespeare authorship question. It's all very cosy and keeps us all happy. Until, one day, the head of department had to miss the session. She had been summoned for a meeting with one of the deputy heads. She came back tight-lipped until she could vent her fury. She had been told there was…

By Bob Dylan Simon & Schuster £35 If you read Bob Dylan's magnificent memoir Chronicles: Volume One or the sleeve notes to his album World Gone Wrong, you'll know what to expect in his new book. As you might imagine from a songwriter so wildly inventive, freewheeling and mercurial, Bob Dylan's prose is splendidly unconventional, full of surreal, crackling flights of fancy and vivid, sense-impressionist memories. This is the same – in fact, it's even more supercharged. The rather loftily titled The Philosophy of Modern Song reflects on 66 records with which he feels a powerful connection. It's a varied assembly, from old show tunes such as Mack the Knife and Strangers in the Night to vintage blues, ballads, country music and unlikely selections from the Grateful Dead, Elvis Costello…

By Anthony Speelman Paul Holberton Publishing £30 Anthony Speelman is one of the most respected art dealers of his generation. He has spent some six decades in the business, selling paintings to the world's greatest collectors and museums. His memoir, A Tale of Two Monkeys: Adventures in the Art World, richly illustrated with reproductions of many of the pictures that have passed through his hands, takes Speelman's readers on a Grand Tour of the art business, replete with vivid descriptions of paintings, people, places and numerous splendid lunches along the way. Speelman's father, Edward Speelman, was also a successful art dealer. His mother, Sally De Casseres, was the daughter of the gallerist and art dealer Arthur De Casseres. Anthony was always, it seems, destined for a life in the art…

Fifty-seven years ago, an annual institution died. Nobody realised it at the time, but on 25th December 1965 an English football league match was played on Christmas Day for the last ever time. After Blackpool beat Blackburn Rovers 4-2 at Bloomfield Road, only in Scotland did Yuletide fixtures remain, staggering on for another decade. It was a rapid decline in tradition. In 1957, there had been a full schedule of 38 matches played on 25th December. Back then, Christmas didn't last for several weeks as it does now; most workers were lucky to get two seasonal days off. Football clubs realised that if they wanted to attract bumper crowds, they needed to play when everyone was at home. But by 1959, as public transport workers too were allowed to join…