Indholdsfortegnelse for February 2026 i The Oldie

Maureen Lipman (p19) stars in Coronation Street. She was in Educating Rita and co-wrote Re: Joyce, in which she played Joyce Grenfell. She writes in this issue about playing Beattie in the BT ads. Griff Rhys Jones (p22) starred with Mel Smith in Alas Smith and Jones and Not the Nine O'Clock News. He writes about playing Jim Hacker in I'm Sorry, Prime Minister by Jonathan Lynn (p79). Ian La Frenais (p38), with Dick Clement, wrote The Likely Lads, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, Porridge, Lovejoy, The Commitments and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet. Hunter Davies (p90), the only authorised biographer of the Beatles, has written over 100 books. His next one, Get Back: John, Paul, George, Ringo and Me, is out later this year. He turned 90 on 7th January.…

WHO WAS the Gainsborough lady? Going to the pictures used to be a charming affair – never more so than when the Gainsborough lady was around. In films made by Gainsborough Pictures, she would come on screen looking like Gainsborough's 1785 portrait of Sarah Siddons, wearing a feathered hat and a gown with just the right décolletage. To the sound of Louis Levy's ‘Gainsborough Minuet’, she would turn towards the audience, smile and gently bow her head. There were three ladies; it's the second who is best remembered. Glennis Lorimer (1913-68) joined Gainsborough Pictures in 1931, after winning a competition run by its sister company, Gaumont-British. Gainsborough Pictures, originally based in Islington Studios, lasted from 1924 to 1951. Gainsborough movies included Oh, Mr Porter! (1937), Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes…

At your local cinema in 1962, a supporting feature might have been the Richard Williams cartoon Love Me, Love Me, Love Me. The sardonic narrator of this everyday story of insecurity, hate and stuffed alligators was Kenneth Williams (1926-88), born a century ago, on 22nd February 1926, in King's Cross. He wrote in his diaries, ‘I really quite enjoyed it’ – high praise by the standards of some of the other entries. That same year of 1962, Kenneth Tynan lauded Williams for his performance opposite Maggie Smith in Peter Shaffer's The Private Ear and the Public Eye, calling it ‘explosively funny’. Kenneth Williams was also the main attraction after Kenneth Horne in radio's Beyond Our Ken, and had completed filming of Carry On Cruising. Williams was then 36, and the…

I was dispatched to interview Marlene Dietrich when she appeared in London in 1969. The legendary diva seemed somewhat depressed. ‘All my friends are dead – Hemingway, Jean Cocteau,’ she lamented. I clocked that she was somewhat cheesed off about growing old – and worse was to follow. After her daughter Maria Riva's death a few months ago, aged 100, La Dietrich's last years were tragically highlighted in the obituaries: afflicted by arteriosclerosis and crippled by falls, she became a whisky and drug addict. Her beautiful legs – once insured for millions – withered, and her teeth grew blackened and cracked. She used a Limoges jug as a chamberpot and flew into drunken rages, according to Maria. If I could go back to 1969, I'd say to Marlene, ‘Don't resist…

The Rev Rosie Richardson conducted the thanksgiving service for Peter Lewis-Crown at St Paul's, Knightsbridge. Lewis-Crown was the sole designer and owner of Lachasse, Britain's oldest couture house, before its closure in 2006. Lachasse, in South Kensington, had designed dresses, suits and gowns since 1926. Lewis-Crown, joined in 1949 at 18. Among his clients were Barbara Cartland, Hermione Gingold, Margaret Thatcher, Norma Major, Betty Boothroyd and Bubbles Rothermere. Lachasse, from the French for ‘the hunt’, produced, Lewis-Crown said, ‘tailored, well-made clothes which flatter women and make them feel confident’. In his eulogy, Harrison Goldman, 30, paid testament to Lewis-Crown's gift for friendship, not least since Goldman was 64 years his junior. One grand client demanded alterations to the dress he made for her 100th birthday: ‘Peter, it's too stuffy. You'll…

There is one sporting event that is going to dominate 2026. No, not the Real Tennis Champions Trophy in July, nor croquet's MacRobertson Shield in August. Not even the European Quidditch Cup in May. I'm talking about the FIFA World Cup, the bloated football competition that will stretch itself across three nations, three time zones and six summer weeks, a tournament so expensive that the cheapest tickets for the final are more than £3,000. What makes the tournament all the more ludicrous is the intrusion by Donald Trump. The Don has become the tournament's principal poster boy. With months still to go, he can't keep away from it. From announcing that he will remove hosting duties from any US city that has a Democrat mayor to the magnificently fawning presentation…

I turned 90 on 7th January. Ninety! I can hardly believe it myself. Here are my tips on how not to become a I grumpy old man. Start young By not being a grumpy young git. Otherwise, you will be set in your grumpy ways. So go around saying: it's brilliant being young; houses so cheap; so much work; fab music; lovely clothes; everyone loves me. It may be rubbish, but soon you will believe it. Everyone loves a cheerful chappie. I was always cheerful, smiling and whistling in all difficulties, as Robert Baden-Powell told us scouts to do. Freezing council house, wartime and an invalid father … but did I complain? Did I, heckers! It seemed normal. Come on, let's go and play marbles in the gutter. Don't say…

Are you into gratitudinising? Apparently it's a real word, or has become one because so many people are using it. I've certainly heard it more often in recent months than the other words the Oxford University Press deemed the words of the year for 2025 – such as biohacking. Biohacking means ‘optimising your body and mind for better performance, health, and longevity through self-directed, experimental changes to habit and lifestyle’ – for example, taking up gratitudinising. We gratitudinisers are more than merely grateful: we are people who are consciously counting our blessings - and doing it on a daily basis and for a purpose. According to research undertaken for the Queen's Reading Room charity (I declare an interest: I'm a trustee), reading fiction for just five minutes a day reduces…

WHAT IS Grokipedia? Grokipedia is an AI-powered encyclopedia created by and for Elon Musk, the richest man ever to have lived. It is an outgrowth of Grok, the chatbot created by Musk's artificial-intelligence division, xAI. And it is far, far better than any of the human encyclopedias, which are created by nasty far-left activists horribly biased against the brilliant Elon Musk. Take Wikipedia, for example, the internet's most popular information source since 2001, with over seven million entries in English alone. Wikipedia is one of the few remaining bits of the internet not in the hands of a billionaire. Rather, it is created by tens of thousands of civic-minded volunteers, who write and edit the pages on everything from King Henry I of Cyprus to the North Indian snack chole…

It started with an audition in 1987. Every ethnic actress in England was there. It wasn't a cattle market, but we all knew we were all there. I had never done a commercial before save one local one, featuring the veteran actress Marjorie Rhodes. Her line was ‘Do they deliver round our way?’ On the 16th take, she was still saying ‘Do they live around our way?’ and it became almost impossible to complete the ad without resorting to ventriloquism. This one was big time. With make-up discussions and a wardrobe assistant. I was 41; the character on the script was 70 and felt weightier than me. At the first auditions, I offered to give the team two versions of Grandma Doris. (Doris's name changed when I asked them in…

As we start another year, we oldies could do worse than to read Jonathan Swift's ‘Resolutions When I Come to Be Old’, penned when he was 30, in 1699: ‘Not to tell the same story over and over to the same People … Not to be too free of advise [sic] … Not to talk much nor of myself’. And it is probably tactless of a positively ancient columnist to remind his fellow oldies of the struldbrugs. These are the people, encountered in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, who are immortal. ‘The least miserable among them appear to be those who turn to Dotage, and entirely lose their Memories; these meet with more Pity and Assistance, because they want many bad Qualities which abound in others.’ Swift (1667-1745) is a writer…

An epic philosophical battle began in third-century-BC Athens. On one side were the Epicureans, named after their founder, Epicurus. Their advice for happiness involved getting out of the city and living in a self-sufficient commune where you would avoid all pain. The movement was very successful: Epicurean ‘gardens’ sprang up everywhere over the next few centuries. In Roman times, Virgil retired to one to write the Aeneid. On the other side were the Stoics. They were very much the urban philosophers. Their name comes from the stoa, the covered walkways in Athens, where they sat around teaching. You should not try to escape pain, they said. You should learn how to cope with it and even love it. Don't rely on external so-called ‘goods’ such as money, success and good…

What a cruel fate! To be a powerful and potent writer and yet be trapped in a public-service comms job. So I sympathise with the wordsmith behind the Humberside Police announcement I've just received: ‘Have you ever wondered what your local policing team do? Would you love to meet your local policing team and find out what they do?’ It used to be that the quickest way to meet your local policing team would be to commit a crime. Now the quickest way is to wait three weeks for their community surgery. I marked the date on the family's shared calendar. Spotting it, Mother suggested I mention to them the newest family into our street. ‘On what basis?’ I asked. ‘They remind me of Uncle Simon's family.’ ‘What crime does…

North London, early 1985. Aged 19, I was very naive – brought up by my grandparents on a farm in the middle of nowhere, before running away to London aged 11 to be with my dad. But that's another story… Lo and behold, I got pregnant. My family had never met the father – not the sort you'd want to introduce to the devil himself for fear of offending him, let alone to very protective parents. Again, that's another story. My family were horrified. The result was reminiscent of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's punishment. I was banished from the family home. I lost my job in the family business and, four months pregnant, was completely penniless. Good friends invariably save the day; I stayed with my friend, her mother and four…

I have long held that an excessive interest in Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) is the sign of a misguided mind. Poe wrote, in The Fall of the House of Usher, of the Mad Trist of Sir Lancelot Canning, that there was little in its uncouth and unimaginative prolixity that could have had interest for a sensitive soul. The same could be said (in my opinion) of Poe himself. Well, de gustibus and all that. Nevertheless, when Poe wrote of Usher that he had an absolute horror of all superfluous sound or noise, he might have been describing me. During the war, there were posters at stations asking passengers whether their journey was really necessary. It is time for posters everywhere asking whether the noise you make is really necessary. There…

I had grown up in a world where everybody was beautiful, everybody was rich, everybody had everything that everybody else in the world wants, and nobody was really happy. Maria Riva (1924-2025), Marlene Dietrich's daughter The depth of anguish, the invisible burdens, the torment that can narrow the horizon until only darkness seems left. Father Philip Chester of St Matthew's, Westminster, in a 2025 requiem mass for his pastoral assistant, who'd killed himself A gentleman is simply a patient wolf. Lana Turner Work as if you were to live a hundred years. Pray as if you were to die tomorrow. Benjamin Franklin One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done. Marie Curie In my end is my beginning. Mary, Queen of Scots…

Iris Murdoch: Poems from an Attic Edited by Anne Rowe, Miles Leeson, Rachel Hirschler and Frances White Chatto and Windus £16.99 Dons feed on malice as the rest of us absorb our mother's milk. I remember when Iris Murdoch's novel The Italian Girl was dramatised and became a West End hit. Her husband, John Bayley, was a Fellow of New College. One of the crueller of his colleagues, with a positively Satanic smile, came up to him in the Senior Common Room and said, ‘Ah, John! I see your … mm … wife has another success on her hands. I walked past the theatre the other day and saw the play advertised, mm, mm, as a “bed-hopping extravaganza”.’ Pause for laughter, which did not even bother to conceal contempt, deep…

Lazarus: The Second Coming of David Bowie By Alexander Larman New Modern £25 There have been almost as many books on David Bowie as there were twists and turns in the chameleonic singer's career. In no particular order, we've had the Rolling Stone writer Rob Sheffield's On Bowie; Nicholas Pegg's unblushingly titled The Complete David Bowie; Paul Morley's formidably brainy mixture of biography, memoir and cultural theory The Age of Bowie; and the authoritative (and occasionally gossipy) Bowie: The Oral History by Dylan Jones. There are lavishly illustrated volumes that analyse Bowie's brief 1970s residency in Berlin. Some linger over his excursions in the theatrical and art worlds. Others chart his metamorphosis from a more-or-less conventional south London boy with dodgy teeth into the space-invader rock star. That star once…

Hampstead Theatre, London, until 31st January The death of an 88-year-old should come as no surprise, but when Tom Stoppard died in November, people reacted as if he had been a man half his age. It seemed inconceivable that such a vast intellect should vanish overnight. Yet the plays he left behind keep that intelligence alive, and that's the magic – the alchemy – of theatre. A novelist's work lives on, but only in the imagination of the reader. A playwright's work is embodied by living, breathing actors. Watching this Stoppard play, on the day of his funeral, I had an odd sensation he was here among us - exactly the sort of metaphysical oddity he loved exploring in his plays. That this particular play should be the first to…

How Elgar's The Dream of Gerontius can blaze and console when heard in the right place and in the right performance! It can also enhance, as it does in The Choral, a recent curate's egg of a film from Alan Bennett and director Nicholas Hytner. The story of a soul passing from life through death to the undiscovered country beyond is as old as time. Elgar's stripped-back setting of Cardinal Newman's originating poem contains moments of high drama – most famously the roar of Satan's exiled crew mocking the world's ‘psalm-droners’ and ‘canting groaners’. Yet Gerontius is an essentially private work, out of kilter with the belt-and-braces certainties of the English oratorio tradition. It took Elgar, the musically self-taught Catholic outsider, to recognise this. It explains why he liked to…

Amsterdam has been thoroughly scrubbed up. Gone are the days when the canals had the colour and consistency of black treacle. The red-light district now can barely muster 25 girls to ply for trade, and chips are no longer with everything. That said, there is a queue for chips, crammed with TikTok desperadoes, on one bridge on the Keizersgracht – and, of course, they come with a truffle-and-Parmesan mayonnaise. The city is bursting with pride at its rebirth, but it's not altogether easy to find a good restaurant. There is a distinct humility about the Amsterdammers. They don't even add a service charge and were thrilled when I added ten per cent, all of which, the waiters assured me, goes direct to them. London restaurateurs, take note. Still, here is…

Former Church pastor fails six times to rent out pool Eastern Daily Press Thief bought pies and a kebab with card Aberdeen Press and Journal School caterer says sorry over Yorkshire pudding blunder Tiverton Gazette £15 for published contributions NEW! Tune into Radio Oldie Every Tuesday, you can find the latest weekly interview by Harry Mount or Charlotte Metcalf with personalities such as Michael Palin, Pam Ayres and Michael Morpurgo. Top of the Pods Each week, we release three more podcasts on Top of the Pods, our selection of the best podcasts and comedy clips on the internet. Just sign up for the newsletter on the homepage of the website. Sign up to our weekly e-newsletter…

For anyone remotely interested in this writer's seasonal resolutions – in which event, the official advice is to request an urgent cerebral MRI – the news is as follows. This New Year, I am mostly resolving to eschew whining about the horrors of the New Year. I wilfully refuse, for instance, to trot out the usual reflections on shuffling about in a tattered dressing gown, pausing only to glance at the bottle of VSOP strychnine gazing alluringly back from the medicine cabinet. Nor will I drone on about the greyness of the skies, the financial impossibility of adequately heating this house, the certainty that the Christmas tree will still be in situ for Wimbledon, or any of the other ritualistic bleak-midwinter drivel that has anchored this page to the sea-bed…

Frederic Raphael's hit BBC drama The Glittering Prizes was first broadcast 50 years ago, in January 1976. Now 94, he remembers a party thrown by the publishing grandee George Weidenfeld when the series was airing. ‘So there was this guest who came up to George and made some excuse about having to leave early,’ Raphael recalls. ‘And George said to him, “Don't be so silly. I know you just want to get home in time to watch The Glittering Prizes. But it's all right – there's a TV in the bedroom so you can watch it here!”’ Over six episodes, Raphael's saga charting the progress through life of a group of Cambridge undergraduates - starting in the early 1950s and ending in the mid-1970s – kept millions of viewers spellbound.…

Piercings were once confined to the earlobes. The late Queen Elizabeth II had hers pierced in 1951, so she could wear the Greville Chandelier earrings on a 33-day state visit to Canada. Throughout her reign, earrings dangled and glittered by her face, framing, lighting and enhancing it. Other women wore earrings for the same effects - although Queen Camilla has resisted piercings and wears clip-ons. Yet, for today's young, piercings are not linked to enhancement. Have you ever seen a potentially beautiful young woman with a giant metal ring through her septum, and wondered, ‘Why on earth would anyone have that installed, let alone someone attractive?’ So have I. How does she blow her nose – or even pick it – when what is advertised to the human market as…

How it must hurt the errant Duke of York to have had his titles stripped from him. One of the proudest moments of my life was when my grandmother's daily first called me ‘Master Giles’ as she welcomed me into the dining room. In the days when chicken tasted of something, she asked, ‘Breast or leg, Master Giles?’ It caused my asthmatic chest to swell with pride. When I went to my prep school, there it was again, on letters addressed to ‘Master Giles Wood’. Surely there's nothing wrong with liking having a title – is it wrong to submit to an atavistic urge to separate oneself from the common herd? Even Sir Keir Starmer likes elitism. Why else do you think he admitted he prefers Davos to Downing Street?…

My tutor group is nearing the end of its time at school. We have just had academic tutoring evening – the parents’ evening spent with form tutors rather than subject teachers. Its aim is to hand over the first set of reports, and then to have a final overview of the pupils as they head towards their GCSEs. As I don't teach any of them English, it's the last time I will see these parents. I have been in charge of their children for five years – five years of considerable change. I found myself feeling surprisingly sentimental about it – of all the tutor groups I have had, I'm the least attached to this one. It is the only time I have ever dreaded teaching personal, social, health and…

Recently, in the same week, I visited Ely Cathedral and the vascular clinic at the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital. Ely Cathedral was built with one thing in mind: the glory of God. It was originally, in the seventh century, an abbey church; in its heyday, it was the richest abbey in England. It is an extraordinary building, best seen at a distance from a train, where it looks like a ship sailing through the fens. Inside, the height beggars belief: how on earth was the nave raised with the sort of scaffolding available when the Norman church was begun in 1083? I wondered, on looking upward, just how many men had lost their lives building its vast columns. It took 100 years to complete. The stone, shipped from a quarry…

For such a remote place, Hawaii has made a big impression on British culture. The organisers of the new exhibition at the British Museum, Hawai'i: A Kingdom Crossing Oceans, point out that the BM is home to the ‘largest and most significant collection of Hawaiian treasures outside Hawai'i’. That connection goes back to Captain James Cook (1728-79), who ‘discovered’ the islands in 1778. The quote marks are advisable these days, to acknowledge the fact that the people who were already there had found them first, perhaps about 1,000 years before. Cook called them the Sandwich Islands, after the 4th Earl of Sandwich, the First Sea Lord, a name that stuck officially until 1840. Cook's own experience in Hawaii did not end well. As a result of what seems to have…

Diet injections Thanks to Mounjaro, people who were respectfully rotund are now woefully thin. I would like to join them, but was quoted around £165 for a monthly subscription. Why? For that I could buy myself a double-ply chunky Boden cashmere cardigan. To lose weight, I'd have to go to one of those German retreats where you get starved and fed a spoonful of honey when it all gets too much. But that would cost £30,000 and take three weeks, and I'm not sure the children or dogs would be alive when I got home. Feeling sick for four months while stabbing myself with Mounjaro is likely the better option, even though it's a cruel reward for three decades of intense child-rearing and a sorry welcome to the menopause. I went…

Margaret Beaufort: Survivor, Rebel, Kingmaker By Lauren Johnson Apollo £30 Lady Margaret Beaufort (1443-1509), mother of Henry VII and matriarch of the Tudor dynasty, has been depicted in history and fiction as either a pious and protective mother or a ruthless political schemer. Lauren Johnson's compelling new biography is a detailed and sensitive re-examination of Margaret's life, interwoven with the Wars of the Roses, and a revealing assessment of how women have been judged by history. A larger-than-life-size portrait (pictured) of Margaret, dressed in solemn black robes, hangs in St John's College, Cambridge. It was painted in her honour shortly after her death, on 29th June 1509, five days after the magnificent coronation of her grandson, Henry VIII. Margaret was 66 when she died, apparently from food poisoning after eating…

Glyph By Ali Smith Hamish Hamilton £20 Most novelists make do with one epigraph. Not Ali Smith, who has furnished her latest novel, Glyph, with five: Margaret Atwood on politics, Honoré de Balzac on machinery, Giorgio Agamben on our debts to the dead, Katherine Anne Porter on art's endurance, and an Edward Lear limerick about a woman being squashed by a door. Broadly conceived, they are all about power. It's a classic Smith trick: to magic up a range of things – and then to reveal, with a twist of the wrist, that they were much the same all along. Glyph follows sisters Petra and Patricia, whose childhood games revolve round two inherited wartime stories. Petra, who narrates parts of the book, offers them up in its opening pages. The…

On In Our Time, Melvyn Bragg was talking with his trio of academics about Emily Dickinson (1830-86), the strange and distinctive American poet, who lived her reclusive life in Amherst, Massachusetts. There was some of the old Bragg spikiness. ‘Well it was in the notes you gave me,’ he said after erroneously bringing up Little Women. Dickinson was Frank Skinner's choice for a reprise of one of Bragg's venerable 27 years of seminars, which culminate in Dickens and Byzantium, before Bragg cedes his chair to Misha Glenny. Glenny was an inspired choice. We were expecting/ dreading a much younger person of the female persuasion. Glenny is clever, genial, well-informed and somehow not a celebrity, despite being author of McMafia and married to Kirsty Lang, a well-established voice on Putin, organised…

The last Taylor Swift album was available in 34 different versions. And some people bought all of them. That's 18 CDs, the cassette edition, the eight different LPs and seven download variants which included, as if they hadn't suffered enough, one that was available for only six hours before being deleted. One of the albums came in ‘sweat-and-vanilla-perfumed orange glitter vinyl’. Any frazzled completist compelled to own the lot had to fork out £475. It hurts just to type it. But no amount of creative packaging could disguise its fundamental flaw: it was a bit of a duff record. A fearsome backlash reared its troubling head, a new and unnerving experience for a singer whose trajectory had always been on the up. And in the rapid, fizzing, replaceable world of…

I thought I should try growing salsify, a root vegetable which is almost impossible to find in shops or markets. It is also known, intriguingly, as the oyster plant. Following the RHS's advice, I prepared the ground with loose soil free of stones, but I had not anticipated the drought of last summer which, without regular watering, caused the salsify's long taproot to split. When I harvested a few roots after the first frosts in mid-November, they had branched like octopus tentacles. But would they taste like oysters? I have to report that the molluscan flavour eluded me. It was mild and ‘interesting’, according to my wife, which I think meant uninteresting. It is easier to peel the roots after boiling them. To avoid discolouring, they should be kept in…

That something as peaceful, bucolic and civilised as winemaking can be thwarted by war's barbarities is not a recent phenomenon. The fighting that led to the collapse of the Mycenaean civilisation, in around 1200 BC, forced winemakers to abandon their war-ravaged vineyards and head for the relative safety of fortified cities. But war is, sadly, a source of anguish for many winemakers in today's fractious world. I was reminded of this while having lunch recently at Sino, a lovely little Ukrainian restaurant in Notting Hill. The owner, Polina Sychova, opened Sino in May last year with chef (and war veteran) Eugene Korolev. His light, playful, clever dishes – potato-and-sorrel waffle with smoked pike roe; beef tartare with mushroom mousse – pair beautifully with her splendid wine list. It features seven…

Here in deepest East Anglia, we have become an entirely digital household. It has rather crept up on us. We watch all our television via the internet. All our radios are digital. Our computers and mobile phones use Wi-Fi or digital networks. Our security cameras and central heating are controlled through our Wi-Fi. And now, our telephone landline has crossed the digital divide. Hitherto we relied on copper wires strung between poles that marched down our lane, as phone lines have always done, but now we have something BT calls Digital Voice. Our telephone service now comes through the internet, with a phone plugged into the back of the Wi-Fi router – not a socket on the wall. I was doubtful about this transition; our landline worked fine, and if…

As the urban age overwhelms the rural, it is fashionable to reintroduce mammal and bird species, especially those rendered extinct by our rustic ancestors. This is typified by the BBC, which now refers to November's first full moon as the beaver moon – not the traditional woodcock or hunter's moon. Currently, the most sensational avian reintroduction is of the sea or white-tailed eagle (Haliaeetus albicilla). Until reintroduction, the last definite UK breeding was on Skye in 1916. In England, it was in 1780 on Culver Cliff, Isle of Wight – cliffs are the sea eagle's preferred nesting site. The Highlands and Islands were its ultimate UK stronghold, but the Anglo-Saxon name for eagle, erne or earn, reveals a more complex geographical history. English place names such as Earnley, West Sussex,…

Hooray for country parks. Chronically underfunded, busy, tatty and besieged by dogs, they still endure, and provide a vital breathing space for the cure of urban souls. I took a walk in Cannock Chase, simply because I was passing, saw a big blob of green enisled by the suburbs of the Midlands on the map, and I'd never been there before. Or perhaps I was seeking a cure. Here at least I found the beneficent miracle that is free parking, a free toilet and a café with no queues, perhaps because it didn't sell a single sandwich. My pre-walk brown lunch of beige soup and sausage roll served on a varnished brown table went down a treat. I set out among trippers of every generation – flotillas of school children…

IN COMPETITION No 327 you were invited to write a poem called The Café. Terry Baldock observed a change in café culture: ‘Now they put your name on a cappuccino./ Can't eat or drink incognito.’ Many entries conveyed melancholy: Jenny Jones was ‘sitting all alone again’. But Peter Wood-Tovey was entirely anti-café: ‘I prefer to boil my own water,/ Instant coffee and a hobnob to dunk’. Commiserations to them and to Penny Smith, David Taylor, Stephanie Wallace, Christopher Kennett, Pauline Watson, Con Connell, Stefan Badham, Philippa Bower, Ian Nalder, Michael Turner, William Wood and Sheelagh Sendall, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to Christopher Allen's Betjemanesque disappointment. I fear that the doily is soiled, dear, And…

By mid-January, many of us have seen New Year's resolutions lapse. But February, our shortest month, is a good time to get a grip again - three days fewer to work on our fitness. Besides, snowdrops start peeking their fragile snowy heads out of the ground. And it's not long before the daffodils begin thrusting upwards to announce spring's arrival. Rather than giving up on pacts we made with ourselves, we should recommit to them, especially as gyms, wellness retreats and spas are still offering good deals. And if you're giving yourself the well-worn excuse that you don't have the right clothes or equipment, it's a good time to catch the end of the sales. You might start taking supplements, walking daily and cutting down on sugar. Or pick up…