Innehållsförteckning för December 2021 från The Oldie

These many months devoted to exploring the ITV daytime schedule with my mother have, perhaps inevitably, had an effect. Unlimited exposure to the faux bonhomie of Phillip Schofield, the winsome banter of Loose Women, and the practised satisfaction of the failed quiz-show contestant (who in defiance of all logic has had ‘a lovely day out’) caused a metamorphosis. The ensuing inertia developed an omega male of unflinching indolence into a tripartite hybrid from Greek mythology: one-third man, one-third recliner chair, one-third remote control. It had for a while been plain that only something far out of the ordinary could threaten the enveloping lethargy. Last week, aptly enough thanks to a jaunt to Olympus, it duly arrived. Of the teatime quiz Tipping Point, suffice it merely to know that the show…

One of the first memorable conversations I had with Grey, when we came to know each other nearly 50 years ago, was while we were driving in his rakish BMW coupé to London from Dunstall, his then home in Kent. He talked spellbindingly about the authorial voice in Henry James’s fiction, and the journey went very fast. The last conversation I had with him, via dictated email, was two weeks before he died; it was about the women in Anthony Trollope’s novels, a more recent passion. As an aristocratic poet-politician, he himself could have starred in a novel by James or by Trollope; he was also like a figure out of Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson, or Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, which he loved for its…

I was lolling by my log fire in Shepherd’s Bush, enjoying the faint smell of wood smoke and the crackle of the flames, and feeling all was well with the world. And then I came across an article in the Guardian claiming that London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, was proposing a ban on wood fires. There was talk of particulates in the air and the general evils of burning stuff. This piece slightly knocked me out of my smug eco-bubble. Was I a polluter? Should I immediately extinguish the fire and loll by a white metal radiator? Too late: the following day a large pallet-load of wood, along with a few bags of smokeless coal, was delivered to our house and left in the street. I roped in a younger mouse…

After a couple of years in New York in my late 20s, I decided I needed to improve my wardrobe. At that point, it consisted of little more than Gap khakis and shirts, often bought as a laundry solution on trips around the country. I had a couple of suits from London, but rare opportunities to wear them. So, after some limited consultation, I went to the menswear department at Bergdorf Goodman, and entrusted myself to a floorwalker named Tyrone. My biggest issue, I told him, was trousers – or pants. I needed them smart, durable and multipurpose. The kind that could survive a night or two thrown in a heap on the floor or stuffed into a bag and emerge looking respectable. Tyrone thought for a while. He seemed…

The best time to look for a new job is between 10am and 11am on a Tuesday in December. The Panama Canal has been closed for only two days since it opened in 1914 – once in December 1989 and once in December 2010. During the whole of December 2017, the sun shone in Moscow for just six minutes. In the First Test in Perth in December 1979, Dennis Lillee used an aluminium bat. It wasn’t till 1980 that the Laws of Cricket specified that the bat had to be made of wood. 3rd December is International Baboon Day. On 9th December 2012, 12,323 people in Taipei City, Taiwan, broke the Guinness World Record for the largest tambourine ensemble. On 10th December 1905, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman became the first person…

By now, everyone is aware, or believes, that obesity is not a sign of prosperity, as it was for much of human existence. Instead, it’s a sign of ill health and, despite efforts to persuade us that it is an illness like any other, of weakness of will. There has been a two-fold increase in obesity in 70 countries since 1980, thanks no doubt to the increased prosperity that allows human weakness of will to express itself in this fashion. It has been estimated that by 2030 some 50 per cent of Americans will be obese. The number of people who are trying to lose weight has increased, pari passu, with the number of obese persons. Unfortunately, attempts to lose weight by dieting are usually unavailing, and lead to an…

In the late ’60s, I worked as a junior studio manager in the BBC’s radio drama department. I was a sound-effects boy. Roger Delgado was often cast as the villain, like The Master in Dr Who. He told me that as the Demon King in a Palladium panto with Charlie Drake, he had to disappear through the stage trap in a puff of smoke in the middle of a sword fight. One day, the mechanism didn’t work. The smoke cleared and he could still be seen wielding his sword. They both realised that, very slowly, inch by inch, the trap was being lowered manually by stagehands. They kept up the pretence of the swordfight, with Roger eventually so low below stage that only his sword could be seen poking up,…

Bodley Head £30 Jerry White has a unique relation to London and Londoners. More than a historian, he is the city’s witness, champion and town-crier, tolling his bell through the streets, oyez, oyez, oyez, proclaiming the latest chapter in the life of the metropolis. White’s method is to describe the growth of this ‘great and monstrous thing’, as Daniel Defoe described the capital, by weaving statistics and figures into the reflections of shopkeepers and street-sweepers. His books unfold a grand narrative in small voices. London in the Eighteenth Century gives us a glittering phoenix rising from the ashes of the fire of 1666; in London in the Nineteenth Century, the now-maturing city goes in search of law and order; and in London in the Twentieth Century, the citizens turn their…

Faber £20 The artists Sybil Andrews and Cyril Power made monotypes in the early 1930s when no one in Britain was interested in the genre. Very few of their daring experiments survive, though there is a fine example by Power in the British Museum, La Coupée, Sark, together with a less successful print by Andrews, Woman of Benin. A monotype is a ‘singleton’, a print reproduced only once. The artist paints onto a zinc plate and passes the plate through a press under pressure. Unlike the majority of prints – monochrome or stylised into flat areas of colour – monotypes can look almost like paintings. The printing process transfers what is in effect a freely executed painting on a zinc plate onto white paper, the whiteness of the paper miraculously…

John Witherow has been a newspaper editor for a quarter of a century, first at the Sunday Times, and since 2013 at the Times. He has been round the block a bit, and seen a few things. We don’t hear much from him. Indeed, I don’t suppose more than one person in a hundred has the faintest idea who he is. With his 70th birthday approaching – and hacks at the Times feverishly expecting him to stand down soon – he recently permitted himself a few public thoughts about the future of the press. What he said at a conference in Lisbon in November would a few years ago have encouraged the men in white coats to lead him away. Even now, his remarks will seem startling to many. According…

CHRISTMAS IS COMING Stir-up Sunday, the last before Advent, falls on 21st November, marking the traditional start to the Christmas preparations. Skip the plum pudding this year, with a chestnut, raisin and brandy bombe to tuck in the freezer. And ask your friendly neighbourhood butcher to pop a good-size joint of beef in the brine pot right now: once jacketed in spices, it’ll keep for a month (or two or three) in a cold larder, improving every day. Spiced beef The Irish way with the Christmas joint that works in a cold climate. Buy your spices from wherever they sell them loose by weight – you need plenty. Serves 6-8 3kg joint uncooked salt beef 12 tbsps ground allspice 6 tbsps ground cinnamon 4 tbsps grated nutmeg 2 tbsps ground…

This month’s Oldie wine offer, in conjunction with DBM Wines, is a 12-bottle case comprising four bottles each of three wines, two of them from the same excellent producer in the volcanic hills of northern Italy: a proper, delightful Soave and a classic, light-bodied Valpolicella. And there is a great-value, fruity claret, unoaked and ready to drink. Or you can buy cases of each individual wine. Soave Classico ‘San Michele’, Ca’ Rugate, Italy 2020, offer price £12.99, case price £155.88 There are fewer more traduced appellations than Soave, but this is the real deal: honeyed, nuanced, long and dry. Valpolicella ‘Rio Albo’, Ca’ Rugate, Italy 2019, offer price £12.99, case price £155.88 Juicy, well-balanced Valpolicella: cherry-ripe fruit with soft tannins and a lick of spice. Château La Petite Borie, Bordeaux…

When my fellow 13-year-old new boys in the dormitory of my first boarding school discovered my middle name was Reginald, they hooted with derisive laughter. ‘I think it’s a jolly good name,’ I bravely said. Their response was ‘Fine then – Reg it will be.’ I was not called by my first name, Nigel, again for the next five years. The moment I left school, I was happy enough to drop Reg and revert to this now deeply unfashionable forename. But, alas, new data from the Office for National Statistics reports that, yet again, in recent years Nigel did not even reach the minimum three registrations in 2020 to merit recording. Where does that leave Formula One star Mansell (b 1953), top classical violinist Kennedy (b 1956), boxing champ Benn…

From the moment you breathe in the air of Belfast, your senses are stoked up with the rich spirit of the place; with the uncommon charm and cheerfulness of the people – ever heartening and helpful – along with the beauty of so many of its buildings. As a bumper bonus, it has the most beautiful public house in the United Kingdom. Once the linen capital of the world, the city went on to harbour a great shipyard, as well as the largest rope works and tobacco factory in the world. My heart quickens with the memory of it all – with the buildings from the 1700s onwards, all proclaiming the prosperity of ‘Linenopolis’, while Victorian and Edwardian palaces of commerce still holler triumphantly at one another in the very…

IN COMPETITION No 273, you were invited to write a poem called Bags. Your least-favourite kind of bag was the ‘bag for life’, which did not live up to its name. But Adrian Fry’s narrator embraced life in bags: ‘I keep my life in placky bags:/Bus tickets, clippings from the press, /Old Guernsey pounds, packets of fags, /Scrawled poems: it’s a mess.’ Commiserations to him and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize, The Chambers Dictionary, going to Max Ross. I can remember when the coalman brought Big bags of coal, a hundredweight in each, But with each bag, in retrospect, we bought Some priceless things, now gone beyond our reach. We bought a friendly fire that made us doze In carefree evenings…

Eric Chappell (p14) created and wrote Rising Damp (1974-78). He also wrote Only When I Laugh, The Bounder and Duty Free. He was an auditor for the East Midlands Electricity Board for 22 years. Nicholas Garland (p20) was the Daily Telegraph cartoonist for over 40 years. He and Barry Humphries (p36) drew and wrote the Barry McKenzie cartoon strip in Private Eye. Simon Brown (p26) was a Justice of the Supreme Court from 2009 to 2012. He was a High Court judge and a Lord Justice of Appeal. His two volumes of memoirs are Playing off the Roof and Second Helpings. Louise Flind (p93), our On the Road interviewer, worked at English National Opera and Glyndebourne. She’s written for Opera Now, Classic FM Magazine and Sussex Life.…

How to enter Our much-loved deputy editor and patron saint of The Oldie, Jeremy Lewis, died in 2017, aged 75. In his memory, we run the Jeremy Lewis Prize, worth £500. It rewards the sort of writing that emulates Jeremy’s wit and lightness of touch in his books and journalism. What to write about In 400 words, recount a memory (similar to our Memory Lane column, on page 51 of this issue). Please begin by saying when the events you describe took place. How to send your entry Simply email your entry to editorial@theoldie.co.uk by 28th November 2021. Please mark it JEREMY LEWIS PRIZE.…

Daily commuting, as it has existed for most of the past 150 years, looks as if it will be one of the terminal victims of the pandemic. No more will hundreds of packed trains deposit workers in the morning and bring them back whence they came in the evening. Few are likely to mourn its passing. I have mixed feelings about this great liberation. On the one hand, it has all come two decades too late for me, since I commuted every working day from 2000 to 2017. On the other hand, we will be dismantling a unique platform from which to view the British negotiating their collective existence. Commuting has shaped our society and landscape and, arguably, our culture since the advent of the railways in the 19th century.…

In 1937, Warne & Co published The Observer’s Book of British Birds. It was a modest affair but an interesting idea; a book for children (although also accessible to adults) that could be easily carried, to help them make the most of the outdoors. Over the next 66 years, a series of 98 were published (and often republished in slightly updated editions). The subjects are as diverse as fungi, jazz and astronomy (authored by Patrick Moore). Today they are highly collectable, with the most valuable (a black-and-white covered edition of Common Fungi) going for £400. But you can build up a healthy collection paying not much more than a couple of pounds for each of these little time capsules. From that first book, Warne began churning out more, to begin…

Should diamond jubilees exist in journalism, I would be celebrating one around now. It’s 60 years since I first saw my byline in print. It was a pretentious film review in a university newspaper. But from then on, Fleet Street was my calling, and I’ve kept a cutting of everything I ever wrote. Many were interviews with the famous. Muhammad Ali told me he hoped his children would become ‘doctors, lawyers, scientists or engineers. For me, boxing was the best thing I could have done. It was the only way I could get rich. If I could, I’d have been a great doctor’. When I interviewed Bob Dylan in 1969, he was more interested in asking me about Elvis Presley’s comeback show in Las Vegas, which I’d just been to…

The 100th anniversary of Dirk Bogarde’s birth earlier this year was celebrated with a front-page story in The Oldie. It’s a safe bet that no comparable tributes will be paid to Laurence Harvey when his 100th anniversary comes up in seven years’ time – born in 1928, he died in 1973, aged only 45. Yet in the only film they worked on together, 1965’s Darling, Harvey got top billing. Throughout the fifties, they were level pegging as the two leading men of British cinema. But neither was an international star, which was something they both hankered after. Dirk took his shot at the end of the decade, going to Hollywood to make Song Without End (1960), a lavish, big-budget and saccharine biopic of Franz Liszt – which sank without trace.…

As a thinker, the Prince of Wales may be 30 years ahead of his time. I can boast of having once been 20 years ahead of mine. It was 20 years ago that I wrote to our local newspaper, the Marlborough Gazette and Herald, and, as I never tire of seeing my name in print, I kept the cutting. My letter protested that Waitrose, purveyors of Duchy Organic products, were selling bee-killing, neo-nicotinoid, anti-bug sprays ‘over the counter’. Not that Waitrose has, to my knowledge, ever sold any products under the counter. Well, blow me down, if, 20 years to the week later, I don’t spot a headline in this week’s local paper: ‘Learn to live with pests,’ says Waitrose as it bans bug spray Many great minds have been…

After I had written two articles for The Oldie, an angry reader berated Alexander Chancellor, then the editor, for employing a contemplative nun: ‘Nuns are lazy women who don’t pay taxes.’ At the time, I stuck my nose in the air and maintained a dignified silence. Seven years on, I think I would be less feeble and might well tell him that I should like to see him try to live as we do for a couple of weeks; his chances of lasting the full fortnight would be slim. We are, incidentally, fully up to date with our payments to the Inland Revenue. An antidote for this disagreeable missive arrived on the same day: an appreciative and charming letter from a retired rear admiral. (Needless to say, this was not…

Blackie’s real story SIR: I must applaud William Cook (Who was Blackie the donkey?, October issue) in maintaining the tradition of never allowing the facts to mar a good story. Don Mackay arrived at Jarandilla de la Vera first, not in the wake of Hugh Whittow of the Sun. Don and his bilingual monkey (slang for photographer) were greeted by a large group of youths calling into question the parentage of the whole of Fleet Street and threatening to kill the English. Don, a man slightly more Scottish than a Cairngorm, understanding the mood, immediately put up his hands and shouted, ‘Glasgow Rangers.’ He was then taken to the bosom of the town and bought Blackie from his owner, certificated by the local Mayor. In gratitude, Don recommended that all…

Bloomsbury £20 This is an ambitious book, weighing in at more than 400 pages. It is advertised as ‘the untold story of Ewan Forbes (1912-91) and the landmark case that rocked British society and transformed the trans experience to this day’. I thought I was being asked to review a book specifically about Sir Ewan Forbes, 11th Baronet, who, as his Daily Telegraph obituary put it, ‘was born on Sept 6 1912 and baptised Elizabeth as the third and youngest daughter of the 18th Lord Sempill’. In fact, this was originally a ‘lengthy research report’ on the whole subject of transgender issues, including how they touch on the laws of inheritance. But the author was advised to focus on the Ewan Forbes case, to disguise a complicated, quite political survey…

The Fell Picador £12.99 If I were a teacher of creative writing, I would ask all my students to read the chapter called Zanzibar from Sarah Moss’s previous novel, Summerwater. Its first sentence is ‘They are trying to have simultaneous orgasms.’ From this startling premise, it establishes character and setting with utter precision and a wicked humour. John Updike would be writhing with envy. It’s a tour de force which any aspiring author would do well to study. Summerwater is altogether one of the finest novels of the Brexit period: slyly political, beautifully observed and as tense as a thriller. Hard on its heels comes The Fell, set during the lockdown of November 2020. At first glance, it’s a simple enough tale. A woman called Kate gets fed up with…

Every generation likes to think that, unlike its predecessors, it is honest, candid and bold in calling a spade a spade. Of course, there are snowflakes who cannot face some of the ugly realities of life, and require warnings before being subjected to passages of Homer or Shakespeare, but they are a minority. Most of us are straight and blunt. Or are we? Look around and you will see that euphemisms thrive. Over the past year or two, we have heard much about ‘shortened lives’. That, of course, is a reference to those who have been killed by COVID. All such people have contributed to another unfamiliar term, ‘excess mortality’, used to describe the COVID victims who pushed the number of deaths to greater heights than would have been expected…

Here’s a question you might like to use next time you’re in charge of the Friday-night quiz down at the Dog & Trumpet. What, aside from the clock, is the most complex mechanical instrument developed in the age before the Industrial Revolution? Answer: the organ. And if you watch Steven Benson’s remarkable filmed documentary about the removal, rebuilding, and reinstallation of the organ of King’s College, Cambridge (Fugue State Films), you can see how extraordinary these instruments have always been. The first King’s organ was built in 1605-06 by Thomas Dallam, who six years earlier had created a mechanical organ-cum-clock for Sultan Mehmed III in Constantinople. ‘A Great and Curious instrument that will scandalise other nations, especially the Germans’ was the judgement of one Elizabethan courtier. Not that the Germans…

DICKENSIAN DINING ‘If the law supposes that, then the law is an ass, an idiot! If that’s the eye of the law, then the law is a bachelor.’ So replied Mr Bumble the beadle, in Oliver Twist, to kindly Mr Brownlow’s suggestion that ‘your wife acts under your direction’. And now you can sit on the very spot where Dickens set the incident, in the Old Sessions House, devouring a plate of panisses. London is awash with new openings, and the Sessions Art Club is the hottest ticket in town. Launched by Jon Spiteri of St John and the artist Jonny Gent, this not-actually-a-club teases you from the word ‘go’. And not just in the search for the entrance – on the north side of the building, opposite Dans Le…

Even as the England team are thrashing about in the World Twenty20 in the UAE, we cricket fans are thinking ahead. What we cannot wait for is the contest that comes next: the Ashes. Historic, meaningful, resonant … this is proper cricket. This is the real thing. It is also the scrap that results in more lost hours of sleep than any other in the sporting calendar. When I was young, keeping up with the Ashes when it was played Down Under entailed sneaking a transistor under the sheets and tuning in to hear commentary that, in its every fizz and crackle, appeared to be coming from within a washing machine mid-spin cycle. As we listened to Jonners and Blowers through the hiss and sputter, it seemed so exotic, far…

I like podcasts – or at least I like notion of them and how they are delivered to us, and I am a fan of a few specific podcasts. If you have not explored podcasts, I recommend that you consider doing so. A podcast is a just like a radio programme except that anyone can publish one online for anyone else to listen to. The word was coined in 2001 as an amalgam of iPod and broadcast. The term has stuck, even though you certainly don’t need an iPod. You can listen on your phone, tablet, laptop, desktop or ‘smart’ speaker. I listen to podcasts at my desk, in the car, or walking the dog. It works like this: you need a bit of free software to find them, but…

Priory tower – the stepping egret pokes the saltmarsh Matthew Paul (b 1966); Christchurch Priory, Dorset, overlooks the Stour estuary and Stanpit Marsh When so many birds are in decline, it is a joy that the beautiful, snow-white little egret (Egretta garzetta) has reestablished itself in Britain, having been once common and then non-existent in modern times. One thousand little egrets were part of the banquet after George Neville’s enthronement as Archbishop of York in 1465. Thomas Bewick (1753-1828), master wood-engraver and author of A History of British Birds, prototype of the modern field guide, commented, ‘No wonder this species has become nearly extinct in this country.’ Extinction elsewhere was enthusiastically encouraged in the 19th and early-20th century by the feather trade. Calvin Taylor Lee’s photograph, taken at Tophill Low…

The air was soft and still, the light was low and the only sound was the gentle patter of beech mast falling on a carpet of dry, dead leaves. Heaven must be a woodland on a fine autumn morning, and it is a peculiarly English miracle that you can find paradise a couple of miles from the Slough Trading Estate. The woes of a sleepless night in Slough Travelodge – if John Betjeman had stayed in a Slough hotel where the card key to the room didn’t work and the bathroom door wouldn’t close if the toilet seat was down, he might have been even harder on the place – evaporated within seconds of my stepping into Burnham Beeches. I arrived at 7.10am to dewy spiders’ webs, blackberries, the distant…

Did she have an affair? Q A couple of years ago, I lost my partner of over 20 years to cancer and have since experienced the full spectrum of human emotions such as love, loss, pain, hope and anger, along with dreams unfulfilled. But I also have some unanswered questions which have niggled me since her passing. I’m pretty sure she was very secretive about money matters and also suspect she had a romantic liaison with a work colleague. I made the wrong choice of confiding in one of her best friends, who misinterpreted these questions as accusations and sternly told me, ‘I still have her back,’ and asked, ‘Why now?’ I fear I may have now lost a close mutual friend and should, in retrospect, have kept my private thoughts…

Lost dog handed to Hereford police Hereford Times Drier crumpets on the menu if carbon-dioxide supplies run low again Daily Telegraph Couple’s sunflower just kept growing Congleton Chronicle £15 for published contributions NEXT ISSUE The January issue is on sale on 15th December 2021. FREE SAMPLE COPY If you have a friend who would like a free sample of The Oldie, tell them to call 0800 8565867. GET THE OLDIE APP Go to App Store or Google Play Store. Search for Oldie Magazine and then pay for app. OLDIE BOOKS The Best of The Oldie Cartoons 1992-2018, The Oldie Annual 2020 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.…

What’s your favourite Christmas film? For my parents, it was always It’s a Wonderful Life. For my children, it’s probably Love Actually. For me, since the grandchildren came along it’s definitely been The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992), starring Kermit the Frog as Bob Cratchit and the great Sir Michael Caine as Ebenezer Scrooge. Caine recently let slip that, at 88, he reckons that, although he doesn’t want to retire, he’s probably made his last movie. That’s sad news – he is one of a kind. Once, having told him how much I admired his Scrooge, I asked our most prolific film star (170 pictures since his first in 1956) to conjure up his ideal Christmas party for me. ‘I think I would be naff enough to serve caviar,’ he said,…

Middle-aged millennials are the latest hybrid of old and new. They are a banana-loaf-baking breed of mid-twenties youngsters. They may well be millennial by birth but, after months of monotonous lockdown living, they are proudly embracing their new-found middle-aged nature. Since first dipping their toes in the soothing waters of a slower-paced lockdown lifestyle, some of them have grown so fond of exploring more senior hobbies that they continue to relish middle-aged lockdown behaviour even after restrictions have fully eased. Middle-aged-millennial behaviour appears in a multitude of forms, from sourdough-baking to knitting, flower-arranging or discovering pockets of joy in weekend menial housework. The Archers, says the Times, is the ‘Rolling Stones of Radio 4’: its cross-generational appeal pulls in millennial listeners, according to the soap’s editor. Having watched the chess-themed…

Am I Jewish? That is how we all felt in the audience last night at Tom Stoppard’s masterpiece, Leopoldstadt, at Wyndham’s Theatre. As you probably know, the play is about a Jewish family in Vienna from 1900 to 1955. It is also about Tom Stoppard’s discovery of his ancestry. And it’s also about many other things. But over it all looms our knowledge of that incomparable crime, the Holocaust, which would soon devour Europe. For me, it was just marvellous to sit in one of my favourite London theatres after nearly two years and see a grownup play. It was the Real Thing, if I may appropriate a Stoppard title. Wyndham’s was designed by W G R Sprague, the other theatre architect beside the great Frank Matcham, and it has…

When Gyles Brandreth honoured the splendid Leslie Caron for her Oldie of the Year Award at the Savoy, he remarked that the song Maurice Chevalier sang in the 1958 movie of Gigi might nowadays be cancelled. It begins, ‘Thank heaven for little girls/For little girls grow bigger every day…’ Actually, the song was banned – by Irish state radio, then called Radio Éireann. It was considered to be ‘suggestive’. Radio Éireann (now RTE) also prohibited ‘I’d like to get you/On a slow boat to China’ (covered by many artistes) for being ‘suggestive’. ‘Oh dear/What can the matter be’, too, came in for some disapproval, since there was a bowdlerised version, where the lyrics continued ‘Two ladies/Locked in a lavatory’. Elvis Presley’s It’s Now or Never, as well, took some time…

I’ve just found myself on a bus to an outward-bound course. A hundred children, many of whom had never spent a night away from home before, were in a state of unequalled excitement at the thought of two nights in a converted railway station, surrounded by friends. Mobile phones were banned (girls ring their mothers and sob; boys take pictures of each other in the shower). So the journey into Dartmoor was not in the numbed silence of screen zombies we have become used to on school trips. Instead there was a hysterical level of noisy joy and a great deal of questioning. The first shade fell on the joy almost as soon as we arrived. A walk down to the park for a picnic lunch was ‘too far’ for…

Lindy Dufferin, painter, conservationist and châtelaine of Clandeboye House, County Down, was remembered at St Margaret’s, Westminster. In 1964, she married the Marquess of Dufferin and Ava (who died in 1988) next door in Westminster Abbey. Thomas Pakenham, the historian and tree expert, led the tributes: ‘Her talents were astonishingly diverse. She was hyperactive: first and foremost a painter, but also a successful tycoon, with her own brand of yoghurt, and a generous host to numerous good causes. A masterly châtelaine and creative gardener.’ He told of the time in the 1990s when Lindy invited some stuffy dendrologists to Clandeboye. He decided to improve the young handkerchief tree (Davidia involucrata) with the contents of a packet of Kleenex. ‘Look!’ I cried. ‘The handkerchief tree has begun to flower.’ ‘Lindy was…

There was something of a craze for poetry readings during the 1960s. Poets were in high demand up and down the land and one of the most popular performers on the circuit was Stevie Smith, whose fame was at its zenith. With her idiosyncratic voice (a kind of nasal drawl), her birdlike movements and her childlike mode of dress, she was a riveting sight. She died 50 years ago, in 1971, aged 68. In 1965, when I was 14, I attended one such event at the annual arts festival held in my home town of Stroud. Smith and her fellow poet Patric Dickinson (after whom I had been named) were appearing there together on a Saturday afternoon before embarking on an Arts Council tour of the south-west. My principal reason…

Not many people in this country, I would guess, grow up wanting to be Prime Minister – apart from the present incumbent, who at the age of five declared that he wanted to be ‘World King’. In the United States, the story is different. An annual holiday around the time of George Washington’s birthday (22nd February 1732) is popularly known as Presidents Day, and every American child knows that (as long as they were born in the USA) they can grow up to be president. Presidents are engraved on the currency and carved into rock faces. Iain Dale, who previously edited a collection of essays on the British prime ministers, has compiled a new collection on the US presidency. Our eyes light on some of the starrier choices of contributors…

Why do weather forecasters make their predictions in down-with-the-people language, which serves only to confuse? On Radio 4’s Today programme, I heard the ridiculous expression ‘rattle the windows’. Seconds later came ‘wet and windy fare’ and finally ‘How do I break this to you gently?’ Within days of hearing that tsunami of nonsense, I’d added more to my list of informal gobbledygook: ‘plume of cloud’, ‘get out and about after tea’ and even this one: ‘13 to 14 degrees? No way, Jose! More like three or four.’ The culprit was often weatherman Phil Avery. You’ve got it wrong, Avery. Your evangelical drive towards colloquialism has nothing to do with trying to make the weather more intelligible. I suspect it has everything to do with you, as a fact-filled meteorologist, using…

‘Prime Minister, stop talking!’ may have been the most controversial broadcast line of this rather dismaying year. But, as Feedback discovered, just as many listeners applauded Nick Robinson for stopping Boris from rabbiting on – ‘There’s no, there’s no, there’s no, there’s no … supply of young people in this country planning to be truck drivers’, he was saying – as were shocked by Robinson’s rudeness. Possibly we’ve all heard too much wittering and blethering on the airwaves this year. Our age group still clings to the habit of listening to actual programmes, at the actual time of broadcast, and enjoys shouting at the radio to shut up. Nobody else cares what Robinson said to the PM. Or bothers much with live radio (except news and sport). By questioning a…

CABBAGES I am surprised to discover that after writing 75 columns on the kitchen garden, I have yet to mention the common cabbage. It may be unfair to call it common – it is, after all, known as the king of the vegetable patch. But I still have distant memories of overcooked cabbage at school, foul-smelling and probably reheated. The French use the word for cabbage (chou) as a term of endearment, which I used to find puzzling, until it was pointed out that chou is also a sweet pastry bun. However, the cabbage’s romantic association does appear in the name of the pointed variety, sweetheart cabbage, which modern chefs, for some unknown reason, now prefer to call hispi. The cabbage has an ancient history, probably going back to the…

What did you do during the Great Plague? I grew a few tomatoes, baked an awful lot of bread, perfected the art of making pâté de campagne, drank too much home-made blackberry gin, and failed miserably at about a dozen other projects, including learning Italian and picking up my clarinet, an instrument that has lain silent for a decade. At least the neighbours are still talking to me. My friend Mehmet Gürs, being of a more dynamic bent, started a new drinks brand. Mehmet is the son of a Turkish father and a Finnish/Swedish mother, and he is the chef/proprietor of Mikla, a rather fabulous Istanbul restaurant, whose rooftop terrace overlooks the Bosphorus. Starved of customers last year, he set about redefining raki, the aniseed-rich spirit that is Turkey’s national…

Anything you can’t leave home without? Anti-itch cream. How would you describe your job? Breaking polar world records, normally against the Norwegians. We’ve broken 40 per cent of those we’ve gone for. Why do you think Britain is more interested in cold expeditions than in hot? It’s a national craving to hear about people getting really, really cold. Is there something you really miss? My wife and 15-year-old daughter. My late wife, Ginny, instigated every expedition and initially came with me. How did Ginny plan the expeditions? First, she’d make sure nobody had done it before. No one had ever been from pole to pole without flying. So we spent seven years without pay, working at weekends in pubs, and got 1,900 sponsors together and an ice-strengthened vessel. Didn’t you…

In 1915, the US card-game expert Bryant McCampbell introduced the point-count method of hand evaluation: ace = four, king = three, queen = two, knave = one. Those were the days of auction bridge, but McCampbell introduced it for auction pitch, a US trick-taking card game derived from the English game of all fours. Then, in 1923, still before contract bridge began in earnest on a cruise liner in 1925, US expert Milton Work publicised it. On this month’s deal, sent to me by John Murrell of Kent, the partnership with 28 points performed enormously worse than the partnership with 12. Dealer South North-South Vulnerable The bidding at table one The bidding at table two (1)Trading on the favourable vulnerability. At table one, West guessed to lead a club. Bingo…