Indholdsfortegnelse for August 2024 i The Oldie

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary When I was a boy, in the 1950s, a few years before Keir Starmer was born, when Harold Macmillan was Prime Minister and we’d never had it so good, and when Andrew Lloyd Webber, aged nine, was starting out as a composer (creating a suite of six pieces for family and friends), the longest-running musical in the history of the West End was an enchanting show called Salad Days. My parents took me to see it at the Vaudeville Theatre in the Strand. Three times. I loved that show. I bought the EP and learnt all the songs. The one that is still in my head, almost 70 years down the line, is the one that begins, ‘Summer and sunshine and falling in love…’ I am just…

WHAT IS air space? Air space is a term for a particular kind of aesthetic - and a particular kind of place - that started materialising at about the same time that social media was born. You can find air space in hotels, malls, cafés and workspaces the world over. It is the natural habitat of the ‘digital nomad’, a place where the Wi-Fi is powerful and the coffee is overcomplicated. If air space has a signature look, it is Apple Store minimalism. Think exposed brickwork, bare light bulbs, potted plants and furniture that isn’t very comfortable. But the crucial thing is that it is more or less the same wherever you go. It is a ‘frictionless geography’ of ‘generic sameness’. It is air space. The term was coined in…

Bird books invariably use illustration as a guide, whether through paintings or through photographs. Carry Akroyd’s screen prints in The Oldie’s Bird of the Month column are interpretations, with bold, abstract solutions, to convey birds swooping, singing, perching and paddling. Thus the title of our new book of Oldie illustrations. As Carry is very much a landscape artist, it is always exciting to see her answer to the latest challenge of sky, land or sea, and how she captures the essence of the bird and fits it to habitat and season. The aim of my bird columns is to celebrate, amuse and inform, in that order. Where possible, poetry, quotation and personal insight take precedence, to circumvent general knowledge and indispensable Google. John Clare has pride of place as a…

Letter from America The plan was to film some spectators arriving for the Trump rally. Hear their reasons for believing that Donald Trump is the answer to their struggles and concerns. Maybe listen to a few opening remarks from the Republican candidate and then hit the road. It’s almost impossible to find a Trump rally visitor not wearing Trump-branded fundraising merchandise. T-shirts, hats, socks, shoes, umbrellas. Often with slogans as outrageous as they are witty. They’re a genial mob. Polite, warmnatured, unworldly for the most part. ‘You’ve come all the way from London to little old Butler?’ Big smiles and mild fascination that an outsider would want to know more about their hero. There’s zero animosity and an immediate sense that they’re good people, seeking answers to their worries. Cost…

History Two hundred years ago, in Hesdin, a town near Saint-Omer in northern France, the world’s most famous funambulist was born. Christened Jean-Franco is Gravelet, he became known to millions as Blondin (1824-97), the tightrope-walker. High-wire acts ran in the family. Jean-François’s father, a Napoleonic veteran, had also been an acrobat. So it was no surprise when he started learning the skill as a boy - a very young boy. By the age of five, he was already adept, and was sent to the École de Gymnase in Lyon, which trained acrobats. After school and a long apprenticeship in Continental troupes, Jean-François, who along the way had adopted the stage name Blondin, joined the company of the world’s most famous showman, PT Barnum, appearing in New York, Boston and Philadelphia.…

Postcards from the Edge I don’t suppose I’ll be going Scottish hillwalking any time soon. I’m doing well if I do 4,000 steps in a day. But if I should choose to brave the Highlands, is it reassuring to know that I mustn’t be addressed as ‘darling’ or ‘sweetheart’ by male mountaineers? It seems that chaps have had a habit of talking down to females while exploring the rugged heights, explaining – or ‘mansplaining’ – how to read maps, and even offering to accompany ladies for fear they might not be safe. This should not occur, according to Dr Richard Tiplady, a navigational expert and leadership guru. Men are not to be condescending to women on such adventure trails. He has listened to ‘horror stories’ about women undergoing such ordeals…

I once met Frank Bruno at a clothing factory in the East End of London. The company produced jeans for the Gloria Vanderbilt Collection and sportswear for Nike in the mid-’8os. I was a sales manager for a distribution company and had driven down from the Midlands to discuss delivery requirements with their transport manager. I was nervous. It was a prestigious account. If I was lucky enough to finalise the deal, it would be a feather in my cap - not to mention a sizeable bonus in my bank account. I got there early and parked. There was a buzz about the place with lots of people mingling around; I wondered what was going on. Entering the reception area, I was aware of lots of balloons in various stages…

Former Daily Mail editor Paul Dacre led tributes to Ann Leslie, the paper’s formidable foreign correspondent, at St Bride’s Church, Fleet Street. Dacre said, ‘A child of Empire, born in a Calcutta of interracial riots, she possessed a brimming confidence, a resilient self-sufficiency and an inner steel that I suspect was forged when she was sent, at four, to a distant Indian boarding school and then, aged nine, back to Blighty to a ghastly, damp, pious Catholic boarding school in the Peak District, rarely to see her parents again. ‘But nothing was as hateful as the bullying she endured on the graduate training scheme - which she was to join at 20 - of the Manchester Daily Express, a swaggering paper which in those days employed 700 people. ‘To be…

It had been extremely good training for me. Shortly after going to work for the publisher George Weidenfeld (1919-2016), I was compelled to write a book. I use the word ‘compelled’ deliberately, because it wasn’t a book that I would have chosen to write. It was in fact a children’s book - and was followed by a second one. George swept into the Weidenfeld & Nicolson board meeting, following his regular session with the directors of Mark & Spencer, at which the list of children’s classics for the next few months was decided. We would then illustrate them, finding exciting modern illustrators, and sell them in the M&S shops to our entire profit, since classics obviously paid no copyright. On this occasion, the list included King Arthur and the Knights…

Free lunch Somerset Maugham’s 1926 short story The Luncheon says it all. A rich, greedy woman asks a broke, younger male artist to buy her an expensive lunch, saying she eats nothing - and then guzzles course after course. Should they have split the bill? Or should she have paid it all? The answer’s not clear-cut; the story was written when men still generally paid. A century later, to finish becoming equal, women must act equal. Though pay inequality is still here, you should cough up half or take turns to pay - if you can afford it. Put your money where your napkin is - don’t nip to the loo when the bill comes. Don’t say, ‘Oh, if you insist,’ unless the other person really does insist because they earn…

I got a call from the Today programme one night. They expect you to salivate at the very mention of their programme, jump to attention and drop everything. These radio johnnies, eh, on the so-called posh progs, they really can be up their own bums. Like me, really. I said, ‘Ring me back later. I’m frightfully busy.’ I was watching England. But, at half-time, as England were so rubbish, I rang Today back to find out they wanted. I assumed they were stuck for someone to twit on about football or the Beatles. It turned out to be the latter something about Paul McCartney going on tour at 82. I said there was nothing remarkable about that. How very ageist of you. When I was 82, I was still playing…

If you feel short-changed at a pop concert these days, you don’t just shrug, moan about it and promptly flog the now offending records. These days, you sue. Madonna is being sued by someone who went to her recent show in Los Angeles. He complained it was ‘too hot’ - she refused to allow any air-conditioning, he contends, and told anyone overheating to take their clothes off. You can’t imagine this holding up in court. He declared himself ‘emotionally distressed’ by the ‘pornographic nature’ of her act - aka topless girl dancers and sauce-related simulation - but, after 40 years of Madonna shows, how could you not know the raunchometer would be in the red? And he claimed she was ‘in breach of contract’ for saying she’d be onstage at…

Having acquired a metal hip at the end of May, I have been out of gardening action for much of this summer. I have had a bit of help with sowing and planting, but the kitchen garden is not producing as successfully this year, and weeds have been outnumbering vegetables. After a spring largely free of frost, however, I have been admiring the quantity of fruit growing on trees and bushes, and have been introduced to a new fruit which is progressing well in our small greenhouse, with very little attention required from me. This is the cape gooseberry, also known as physalis. It’s a small orange fruit when ripe, growing out of a papery husk, which accounts for its more familiar name of Chinese lan tern. Although the fruit…

In early July 1996, I found myself in the small fishing town of Corme, on Galicia’s Costa da Morte - the ‘coast of death’, a craggy corner of the Atlantic strewn with shipwrecks. I was happily eating and drinking at a trestle table under a marquee. I was one of hundreds of guests at the annual festa do percebe, celebrating the local goose-necked barnacle, a delicacy scraped from the rocks. Its unprepossessing exterior - percebes are sometimes called ‘devil’s toenails’ - masks tendrils of delicate, sweet, briny flesh. Even then, a small plate of percebes with boiled potatoes cost 1,500 pesetas (about £7.50). So most guests filled their bellies with slabs of empanada, a local pie stuffed with salt cod or tuna with onions and peppers, washed down with glasses…

Why do we trust what a computer tells us more readily than anything a human says? Think of weather forecasting. If a website or app on your phone says it will rain, that’s good enough for most of us, even if it turns out to be wrong. I am an Englishman – so naturally I often discuss the weather. In fact, for many years I have kept rain records in our garden. For the last few years, my love of things digital has included my buying a small solar-powered garden weather station that continuously transmits all sorts of climate-related data to a website located in, appropriately enough, the cloud. I can check the weather in my garden from anywhere in the world, as well as look at the records since…

Roger Lewis (p14) wrote Seasonal Suicide Notes and biographies of Charles Hawtrey and Peter Sellers. Erotic Vagrancy, his book about Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, is to be a TV series. Dick Clement and Ian La Frenais (p22) are one of Britain’s greatest screenwriting partnerships. They wrote The Likely Lads, Porridge, Lovejoy and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet. John McEwen (p18and P79) writes our Bird of the Month column, illustrated by Carry Akroyd. Their new book, Swoop Sing Perch Paddle, is out on 1st August. He helped to found The Oldie in 1992. Fay Maschler (p80) is restaurant critic of Tatler. She was restaurant critic of the Evening Standard, 1972-2020. She is author of Eating In and, with Elizabeth Jane Howard, Cooking for Occasions.…

Grumpy Oldie Man As life meanders on towards the grave, the unanswered questions mount up. Why is the BBC executive who chose Laura Kuenssberg to co-host its electionnight coverage at liberty, and not weaving macramé pot-plant holders in a medium-security psychiatric facility? Is the deity responsible for this planet actively malevolent or plain stupid? And do mixed-doubles players who cover their mouths when talking between points really imagine there are professional lip-readers in the crowd, poised to decipher their words and relay them, via a two-way radio mic, into earpieces covertly worn by the opposing team? It’s not Visitors’ Day in the White House situation room. It’s mixed bleedin’ doubles out on Court 14. Of all the myriad mysteries currently crowding the mind, however, the most pressing is this: how…

Iam one of nature’s Yes Men. There’s a tendency to dismiss us as craven, spineless creatures of little moral worth. But isn’t ‘Yes, dear’ one of the great maxims of family life? ‘You’ll call the plumber, won’t you.’ ‘Yes, dear.’ ‘Did you remember to renew the car insurance?’ ‘Yes, dear.’ ‘Will you pick up the cleaning?’ ‘Of course, dear.’ ‘Yes, dear,’ is the tranquilliser dart of domestic discourse. We Yes Men say it without thought or consideration. ‘Yes’ is open to multiple interpretations and has a host of subtleties to it. There’s the energetic, dynamic ‘Yes!’ ‘Yes’ that promises action! ‘Yes’ that means, well, ‘Yes!!!’ ‘Say “Yes!” to Jesus!’ There’s the optimistic, positive ‘Yes’. Look online and you’ll find a secondhand bookshop’s worth of self-help books built around the power…

John Standing is 90 on 16th August - ‘I’m older than God!’ he jokes. He is still basking in the glow from his appearance alongside Michael Caine in The Great Escaper (2023), long-listed for a BAFTA Film Award. In the film, based on a true story, Caine, 90, plays Second World War Royal Navy veteran Bernie Jordan, who broke out of his south-coast nursing home to attend the 70th anniversary D-Day commemorations in Normandy in June 2014. Standing plays Arthur, an RAF wartime veteran who befriends Bernie. Despite their long and distinguished acting careers, the duo’s paths had crossed only twice before. First, when Standing appeared with Caine in the film The Eagle Has Landed (1976), about a fictional German plot to kidnap Churchill during the Second World War. Secondly,…

Mary Killen’s Beauty Tips Ian Fleming, creator of James Bond, died 60 years ago - on 12th August 1964. He was the kind of man I always assumed I would have found attractive, had we overlapped. But then I read in a 1959 women’s magazine that he claimed English women were ‘not worth a man’s time’ because most of them were ‘unwashed, absolutely filthy - they seem to think that make-up, stuck on in great thicknesses, gives them an excuse for not washing’. Surely it must have been the drink talking? Fleming did drink a huge amount - at one point, a bottle of gin a day, until his doctor persuaded him to switch to bourbon - and so he was ‘bilious’. He smoked 60 cigarettes a day, despite the…

Town Mouse Have you noticed that your children completely ignore the values, principles and aesthetics you attempted to instil during childhood? Take young Master Mouse, now in his mid-twenties. When he was a young mouse, his parents’ idea of interior design, if they had one, was lots of books, overflowing ashtrays, Persian rugs and black floorboards. Call it shabby Gothic. It’s a style that shocked and fascinated the young, working-class Gary Kemp of Spandau Ballet. He first encountered it at the house of his hip, poetic, posh, swinging neighbours, Fran and Jay Landesman (whose son Cosmo writes about their Islington house on page 24): ‘They were rich people, but inside all the chairs were falling apart and didn’t match the sofa. There were posters of Mao on the wall and…

When I was a child, in the fifties, one of my favourite hobbies was to read magazines. Well, not just read them. I scoured them intently and every time there was a form to apply for something, I filled it in and sent for it. Every day, I looked forward to the postman bringing me something: letters, packages and, even better, big parcels. I received a large teaching display with lots of lovely, coloured pictures about chocolate. It covered the complete process, from the picking of the beans to factory production. I also received bean samples and chocolate. All kinds of booklets turned up with cookery recipes, gardening offers, decor suggestions, household items, thermal underwear and many fashion catalogues. I loved to cut out all the pictures of people and…

The Doctor’s Surgery How easy it is to grasp the wrong end of the stick or to mislead without really meaning to! An article in the Guardian newspaper recently was headlined ‘Weight loss drug could reduce heart attack risk by 20%, study finds.’ The report of the study dealt with 8,803 patients over the age of 45 who were overweight but not diabetic. They were given a weekly injection of semaglutide for 40 months on average. The study stated that 132 of them (plus or minus a margin of error) would avoid heart attack, stroke or death from cardiovascular disease they would have suffered, were it not for the drug. Since the reduction in heart attack, stroke or cardiovascular death was not dependent on either the initial weight of the…

The House of Beckham: Money, Sex and Power By Tom Bower HarperCollins £22 Tom Bower is an expert in interesting monsters. He has done Boris Johnson, Mohamed Fayed, Klaus Barbie and Robert Maxwell twice. Now he’s turned his pen towards David and Victoria Beckham, the footballer and ex-Spice Girl, married for 25 years. It’s a densely packed summary of every tabloid article he has found. Because it is written without access or sympathy - you need one or the other to bring the reader with you - it feels strangely discordant and weird. Talk about bringing a tank to a knife fight - and still losing. David and Victoria are working-class heroes: there is a lot of snobbery in this book. People from a different class are allowed to love…

All His Spies: The Secret World of Robert Cecil By Stephen Alford Allen Lane £30 History is written backwards. From the secure vantage of long centuries, we know how events turned out. The Spanish Armada was defeated. Under Elizabeth I, and with the guidance of Burghley and his son Robert Cecil, England was as well-governed as was possible in an early modern monarchy. By the end of Gloriana’s long reign, the Church of England was beginning to settle down and that compromise between Protestant and Catholic seemed to suit the English temperament. ‘Dearly beloved’ - what an attractive phrase, especially when the English manage to live up to it. With Elizabeth’s death, the succession moved effortlessly to the Stuarts, and everything began to go wrong. They lacked both long-term replacements…

Oldie Man of Letters I recently went to the unveiling of a blue plaque in South Kensington for my old friend and heroine Iris Murdoch. I thought of her political journey, from member of the Communist Party to someone who thought Ian Paisley would save Ireland. What prompted her to abandon being a lefty was what she rightly regarded as the Labour Party’s betrayal of the poor in one vital area, which had remained central to British life since the Middle Ages - education. The system of grammar schools and direct-grant schools was not perfect, but it could have been tweaked rather than swept away. All these schools taught languages and science to a standard as good as that of the private schools and, in many cases, it taught such…

The drama team at the BBC has its work cut out, what with Happy Valley being over and ITV now the moral pulse of the nation. No sooner had ITV given us Mr Bates vs The Post Office than it rolled out the superb Breathtaking, with Joanne Froggatt as a front-line Covid consultant in a city hospital in the early months of 2020. In a bid to keep up, the Beeb’s summer treats include Jenna Coleman as rooky detective Ember Manning in The Jetty investigating how a house fire connects a podcast journalist, a missing-persons cold case and a man in a ‘relationship’ with two under-age girls. The BBC is also running High Country, an Australian crime thriller inspired by real events which took place in Victoria’s ancient and perilous…

Amuse Bouche is Carolyn Boyd’s excellent new guide to the regional joys of France at table. She reveals how the baguette de tradition (flour, yeast, water, salt - no preservatives) has lately achieved a listing in UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage. What took them so long? When I was a student in Paris, fresh out of a dismal English boarding school in the late 1950s - miniskirt, black stockings, white lipstick, kohl-rimmed eyes, channelling Juliette Greco - the most delicious thing that ever happened was baguette jambon buerre - warm baguette, salty Normandy butter, thick-cut Bayonne ham - eaten on a bench by the Seine with a view of the bookstalls on the Left Bank and the possibility of a second-hand copy of Lawrence Durrell’s The Black Book. Those were the…

It’s been the summer of the long farewell. All around us, great British legends are heading off to spend more time wondering what on earth to do next. On Wimbledon’s Centre Court, Andy Murray, encouraged by the returning Sue Barker, dutifully turned on the waterworks. He was not the only one. His mum, Judy, was caught by the cameras crying. Nearby, his wife, Kim, blubbed away. Down by the umpire’s chair his brother, Jamie, with whom he had just played a doubles match, was in floods. We are unlikely to see his like again - arguably the greatest British sportsman of all time. Murray himself looked a little uncomfortable as he stood amid the torrents of eulogies. Not because his back was stooped by the lingering effects of a life…

New issues are the lifeblood of any stock market. Without them, a combination of takeovers and failures means the market is forever shrinking. There is much angst at the way the number of stocks listed on the London Stock Exchange has been falling, compounded by the lacklustre performance of those remaining, compared with other major markets. There are convincing reasons for this. Pension funds were effectively penalised for holding shares by Gordon Brown in a policy that drove them towards bonds instead. Investors everywhere have been diversifying internationally, which in practice has meant holding more US stocks. London is also one of the last exchanges where buyers must pay stamp duty. One per cent may not sound much, but it looms large when dealing costs generally have fallen. On top…

Taking a Walk In 1988, a few years before ‘rewilding’ was coined, and decades before it took root, a farmer in deepest Bedfordshire took the unusual decision to stop farming his 377 acres. Ever since, Strawberry Hill, an ordinary slice of gently rolling countryside hiding between the A1, A6 and A14, has been left alone - no ploughing, cutting or pesticide-spraying. What’s emerged is something extraordinary - a new (or old) English Arcadia. I took a midsummer walk there to experience its magic. Bedfordshire is disparaged as the nadir of our intensively farmed, naturedenuded countryside. Look on a map and it appears dominated by busy roads and sprawling suburban towns. But as soon as I left the A14, I found myself bumping on to rutted country lanes, traversing a somnolent,…

Is there anything you can’t leave home without? A sleeping mask. One of the things I like about going away is leaving all the things behind. Is there something you really miss? I don’t miss anything except the dog. Do you travel light? Not as light as I should. My son has everything in his rucksack for three weeks. I envy that. What are your holiday memories from seven to 13, when you lived in India, where your father was an actor-manager? I didn’t have holidays as a child. There would be two days in the hill stations with some friends in my early teens. We travelled for a living - so staying in one place was a holiday. Did you act as a child? I was put to work…

Main route partially blocked as caravan loses wheel Dorset Echo Farmer finds lost watch in cowpat 50 years on Daily Telegraph Narrow escape for couple as tree falls down in blustery weather in Telford Shropshire Star £15 for published contributions SIGN UP! SIGN UP! for the FREE Oldie newsletter Every Friday, we will send you the very latest stories and features - the more timely stuff which doesn’t make it into the magazine. And a joke from the late great Barry Cryer. Plus you get advance notice of our literary lunches, reader trips and courses. Don’t miss out. Go to www.theoldie.co.uk and enter your email address in this box: Sign up to our weekly e-newsletter…

WHAT WAS the National Spoon Campaign? ‘Wear a spoon and be happy’ was the simple message of the National Spoon Campaign. It was created at Winchester College in early summer 1968. Harold Wilson was Prime Minister, the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour was the number-one album, and the world was awash with riots. Almost every student in the West seemed to be protesting about something. We teenage schoolboys decided to join the throng, keen to promote our own message of peace. The spoon appeared to us to be the least aggressive member of the cutlery family as it was neither sharp-edged nor pronged, and so it became our chosen emblem. We were two 14-year-olds (my friend Robin Parker and I) with an older boy, Anthony Thompson, lending avuncular support. We had…

I recently agreed to model a dress (pictured) made from willow bark from the King’s Sandringham estate. It was designed by my good friends Vin and Omi. Omi is pretty, dyslexic, creative, and mad. She often wears crazy make-up and a party dress. Vin is big, strong, logical and wise, and dresses in combat gear, a Mohican hairdo and make-up. They are obsessed with sustainability. Everything they create, from clothes and cosmetics to business processes and feature films, has saving the planet at its core. Their latest venture is a fashion exhibition using textiles made from bog cotton, nettles, wood mulch, you name it - all from the royal estates. You can see it at Sandringham until October. I should have learnt from experience and refused. I’d once, for a…

Country Mouse What’s eating James O’Brien? For some reason, Mary likes to listen to LBC on the radio in the mornings, but the lugubrious, mockney tones of the Old Amplefordian are normally a cue for me to make a sharp exit to my greenhouse. He reminds me of nothing so much as a Labrador who’s become obsessed by a stone too large for its muzzle but can’t let it go. His obsession that morning was a favoured leitmotif of O’Brien’s - namely the tyranny wielded by Old Etonians. The then Shadow Foreign Secretary, David Lammy, having observed Cameron, Johnson and Cleverly at a recent Trooping the Colour ceremony, compared the trio to ‘colonial administrators’ who exhibited a ‘certain kind of public-school smallness’. Intrigued by what ‘public-school smallness’ might be, I…

Sophia Waugh: School Days I had a university friend from Hull, who claimed there was a local saying, ‘I were that surprised I could write bum on t’wall.’ He also said that you would often find a piece of graffiti - ‘BUM’ in huge letters - which always made him wonder what had surprised the graffiti artist so much. This week, I surprised myself by writing ‘PENIS’ on the whiteboard. In big block letters, in front of a class of 14-year-olds. I was not teaching biology or sex education. I was, as usual, teaching English. The most boring part of the curriculum, too – English Language Paper 2, Comparing Two Texts. Trust me, it’s dull. But still no excuse to write ‘PENIS’ on the whiteboard. I stood back and looked…

In Mere Christianity, written in 1955, CS Lewis draws the reader’s attention to failings that occur in Christians of different persuasions and backgrounds. He says that, come the Day of Judgement, some will be surprised to learn that they have paid far too little attention to social justice, often failing to recognise that the poverty of the poor needed remedying. Others will not be expecting to be reprimanded for their lack of basic good manners. This year is the 700th anniversary of the birth of the founder of Winchester College and New College, Oxford: William of Wykeham, I think it is safe to assume that the pupils at the school will be reminded of its famous motto, ‘Manners makyth man’. In these enlightened days of gender distinction, Wykeham would be…

The Oldie, 23-31 Great Titchfield Street, London, W1W7 PA letters@theoldie.co.uk To sign up for our e-newsletter, go to www.theoldie.co.uk My Viennese whirl SIR: Harry Mount’s article about the filming of The Third Man (June issue) reminds me vividly of the three years I spent in Vienna (1951-54), teaching English in a private school that was re-establishing itself after having been closed down by the Nazi authorities. The city was still in four zones: American, British, French and Russian, There were two schools, one in Grinzing (American) and the other in the south (Russian) zone. I travelled daily on trams between the two zones and so could see where the fiercest fighting had been when the Russian troops, who were the first into the city at the war’s end, arrived. There…

Good Chaps By Simon Kuper Profile Books £9.99 Margaret Thatcher used to make Cabinet members pony up for the cost of the sandwiches during political meetings. As the grandees fumbled grumpily for pound coins, she explained that catering could be supplied by the public purse only when they were addressing government business. Her Foreign Secretary Peter Carrington resigned in 1982 for failing to see the Argentine threat to the Falklands - perhaps the last truly honourable resignation in modern political history. Somewhere around that time, the party of estate owners morphed into the party of estate agents: a life in politics was less one of public service than a career. Labour were little better. Fuelled by the fashionable notion of a cash-powered transactional meritocracy, just weeks before his 1997 landslide,…

Yes, black is slimming, but it’s not always youthful. The right tone of red, however, is flattering on all women. Twiggy You never know a guy till you’ve tried him in bed. You know more about a guy in one night in bed than you do in months of conversation. In the sack, they can’t cheat! Edith Piaf People think it always rains in Manchester. Not true, though I admit it’s the only town in the country with a lifeboat drill on the bus routes. Les Dawson ‘The on’y thing the Army cures you on,’ Arthur retorted, ‘is never to join the Army again. They’re dead good at that.’ Alan Sillitoe, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958) I think I have more humour in me than anger. But those two…

RSC, Stratford-upon-Avon, until 6th September ‘There’s no possibility of being witty without a little ill nature,’ wrote Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751-1816). This flamboyant rendition of his greatest play confirms his shrewd maxim. In our woke new world of cancel culture, where the slightest faux pas can end in ignominy, Sheridan reminds us that causing offence is a fundamental part of art and life. Sheridan’s scurrilous, vivacious characters are gloriously bitchy, trading snide bons mots and put-downs in an orgy of salacious gossip. But there’s more to his caustic comedy than cutting repartee, and that is why it has lasted. Nearly 250 years since he wrote it, The School for Scandal’s central message endures: kindness always trumps cruelty, and character, like the truth, will out. Unlike most comedies of manners, the…

After a day’s work at Oldie Towers, I cycle through Soho, past the throngs of workers standing outside pubs, sinking pints. I used to be one of them. Now, I’m bewildered by them; I just want to get home. ‘Fancy a drink after work tonight?’ used to be the standard cry at four o’clock, just two hours after we’d left a packed pub at lunchtime. But now pubs are all but empty during the lunch hour. Maybe this is why so many evening pavements are dominated by drinkers, often cordoned off from the street by a rope. I very rarely go to pubs at all now, but last month I went to the Devonshire Arms near Piccadilly Circus on a Tuesday and to the Jugged Hare near the Barbican the…

Why choose one car over another? Leave aside the usual utility reasons - affordability, availability, reliability, running costs, fitness for purpose - and you’re left with reasons that are more about you than about the car. Status, colour, aesthetic appeal and performance are some of the obvious ones, indicative of aspects of you. Others, less obvious, include sentimentality, memory, nostalgia and admiration of the qualities your choice represents. This list largely accounts for my renewed yearning for a Rover P4. You have to have been automotively aware in the 1950s and 1960s to recall those large, well-rounded, dignified beasts with a noble nose. Nicknamed Auntie Rovers, they were the opposite of flashy. They were the personification of solidity and stylistic restraint. A fellow enthusiast reckoned them the Labradors of the…

IN COMPETITION No 308 you were invited to write a poem called The Knee. ‘Long will you search before you see/ A rhyme to celebrate the knee,’ John Robinson began. No longer. Jenny Jones apologised to Keats: ‘Season of skin and pallid tightlessness, / Close-scrutinised in the revealing sun.’ Basil Ransome-Davies’s thoughts turned to film: ‘Though Claire’s Knee proved a winner for/ Director Eric Rohmer,/ Whose talent cineastes adore,/ It put me in a coma.’ Bruce Maunder Taylor even incorporated a crossword clue: ‘Keen athlete fell, so late withdrawn.’ Commiserations to them and to Ian Mason, Clare Hawkins, Ian Higgins, D A Prince, Erika Fairhead, Erica Smith, Ann Beckett and Sue Smalley, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers…

Ask Virginia Passing judgement Q Has anyone else noticed the horrible habit of describing anyone who has died as having ‘passed?’ Why is this now the fashion? Name and address supplied A The last time I was in the States I saw, on sale, a book called 100 Ways to Live to 100. As I am myself a recently-turned-80-year-old beset with the usual - and unusual - ailments, I can think of nothing more horrifying. But in the States they don’t seem to be able to countenance anything but living for ever. I’m afraid the word ‘passing’ is an Americanism that has polluted our shores, too. Here in the UK, people pass you in the street; they pass exams; they make passes at you in lifts; they pass muster; or…