Innehållsförteckning för February 2023 från The Oldie

Gyles Brandreth's Diary I have started the new year with a new hobby. I am taking a weekly walk down memory lane – literally. My physiotherapist, Finola, is doing her best to improve my posture and balance in the hope that I fall over less in the future than I have in the past. Part of her regimen requires me to take regular brisk walks. To add interest to my promenades, I have decided to revisit places I once knew well but haven't been to in a while. I started in Oakley Street, London SW3, where I lived with my parents as a little boy in the mid-1950s. It's a wide, handsome street of Victorian terraced houses that runs from the King's Road down to Cheyne Walk and the River…

WHAT IS main character syndrome? Main character syndrome is when you find yourself behaving like the protagonist of some kooky Hollywood romcom. Or maybe it's a French arthouse movie for you, a Taylor Swift video, or a novel by John Le Carré. You imagine all the world is your stage and everyone you interact with is a supporting player. Not a medically recognised condition, it's a way of investing each mundane interaction with cinematic grandeur and novelistic significance. The term gained currency on pandemic-era TikTok, when millions of bored teenagers started uploading parodic videos, gently ironising their own humdrum lockdown routines. Some are funny deconstructions of common Hollywood tropes – the montage of the romcom heroine returning to her home town, for example. Main character syndrome isn't confined to TikTok.…

Sponsored by The kitchens of the National Liberal Club are closed until May. So we have decided to go on tour, in aid of local charities (save the dates: 26th April at Fairlight Hall near Hastings; 9th May, back at the National Liberal Club) on Et Tu, Brute? The Best Latin Lines Ever, written with John Davie Harry Mount Latin omnibus, from Virgil to saucy graffiti Andrew Lownie on Traitor King: The Scandalous Exile of the Duke and Duchess ofWindsor The gripping tale of the Windsors after the Abdication Sasha Swire on Diary of an MP's Wife The juicy inside story of the David Cameron years TO BOOK TICKETS email reservations@theoldie.co.uk or call Katherine on 01225 427311 (Mon-Fri 9.30am-3pm). The price is £60 for a three-course lunch including wine or soft drinks • Fish and…

Postcards from the Edge We're in the age of compulsory equality – and now it has reached the community of the saints. The Irish celebrate St Patrick's Day across the world on 17th March. But this year, for the first time, St Brigid is to be given equal status with St Pat – with her very own bank holiday. St Brigid's Day is traditionally on 1st February, but the public holiday for Brigid will now be held on the first Monday of every February. Brigid was a holy woman who flourished in County Kildare from c 450 AD until 523. It's said her father was a nobleman and her mother a slave. She was (according to legend) an early peace advocate, who broke her father's sword to deter him from…

• Napoleon owned 1,762horses. • The Queen owned more than 3,280 racehorses. • A horse is capable of almost 15 horsepower. • Horses have the largest eyes of any land mammal. • A horse's skin is more sensitive than a fingertip. • A horse's teeth take up more room in its head than its brain. • Horses have five ‘hearts’: each hoof acts as an additional blood pump. • The average horse weighs over half a tonne (540kg). • The sound of the hooves in a televised horse race is actually a recording of asloweddown buffalo stampede. • More people in Australia are killed by horses than by bees, wasps, snakes, spiders and jellyfish combined. • Horses were first domesticated in Kazakhstan. • Today's ‘wild’ horses are all descended from domesticated horses…

The Doctors Surgery I hesitate once again to bring my own case before the public, but I do so for purely educational purposes. Besides, who is not interested in his own case? For the last several months, I have suffered from a condition called polymyalgia rheumatica, which has a lifetime prevalence of more than two per cent among women and one per cent among men. It afflicts mainly those of about 70 years of age and seems to be increasing in frequency for reasons that are not understood – not surprisingly because its cause is unknown. The symptoms are pain and stiffness in the shoulders and the pelvis and hips. It has one serious complication, giant cell arteritis, which occurs in ten per cent of untreated cases and can cause…

In the summer of 1976, I had a phone call from Ted Heath's PA. I was working at Westminster as a political correspondent for the BBC. Would I like to help set up an event on TV, I was asked, to celebrate Heath's 60th birthday? Heath had lost both the premiership, and the leadership, of the Conservative party. So he needed cheering up. We hit on the idea of getting him to go to London Zoo to feed one of the two pandas that Mao Zedong had presented to him during a visit to China in 1974. Heath had given Mao two very rare Pére David's deer, and a book by Charles Darwin. One panda, a female, was called Ching Ching. The other was a male called Chia Chia but, as…

By Anne Glenconner Hodder & Stoughton £22 As she enters her tenth decade, her spirits unflagging, her memory undimmed, and her pat rician beauty unchanged, Anne Glenconner has clearly discovered the fountain of truth. Four years after publishing her acclaimed autobiography, Lady in Waiting, and with a couple of novels in between, she has returned to her first subject and delved truthfully into that past. She expands on the frequently distressing periods of her life, and in particular the mistreatment she suffered during her long and disturbing marriage to the waywardly charming though quixotically tempered Colin Tennant. While, at the time, she hardly registered it as such – most people were barely aware such a ‘condition’ as being a battered wife existed – she was the victim of his mental…

By Rory Knight Bruce Mount Orleans Press £20 Rory Knight Bruce was one of Fleet Street's characters in the 1980s and ‘90s: a bit of a legend in his own lunchtime. A Puck-like, Will-o’-the-wisp Withnail in everyone's peripheral vision, he seemed to appear from nowhere, leaving a trail of larger-8than-life pranks, triumphs and more frequent disasters, which fuelled drunken gossip to everyone's amusement. For a period, he edited that prepschool of posh journos, the Evening Standard's Londoner's Diary, from where he sallied forth nightly to terrorise society and browbeat complainants. And then he was gone – rumoured to have become a Master of Foxhounds somewhere in the great blood-drenched Valhalla that is the British countryside. Twenty pages into An Unanchored Heart – a suitably i930s-ish-sounding title, being both dated and…

History Britons are obsessed with the weather, so why doesn't it play more of a part in our view of history? As far as British history is concerned, that might be because extremes of weather have been quite rare. By the standards of the tropics, or the unforgiving polarities other countries have to put up with, we are, or at least have been, pretty lucky. That is not to say that weather hasn't played a part in our history – or been assigned one by historians and chroniclers when convenient. A book to be published later this year by the global historian Peter Frankopan – The Earth Transformed – set me thinldng. Frankopan's canvas is as broad as it possibly could be: the whole of human history across the whole…

We're in the depths of Dry January: the month of sobriety and austerity. I'm utterly skint. I've already made some raids on the freezer, discovering mackerel from June and an iceberg of various stocks which I have dragooned into soups. Last night, I found a tin of gesiers de canard (duck's gizzards), which I will have for dinner with a clothes peg on my nose. I'm very bored – so bored that I have done an analysis of the cost of eating out in 1973 compared with 2023. In front of me is a 1973 menu from the Ebury Wine Bar, on the edge of Belgravia. It had just been taken over by Nigel Pullan and Shura Shihwarg, the res taurateur husband of Joan Wyndham (Love Lessons), who went on…

A seven-year-old Range Rover Sport hybrid suffered complete main-battery failure. It was the hybrid battery, not the ordinary car battery. A partial failure would apparently not have been too serious because sections can be replaced. But replacing the whole thing requires a special jig (because the battery is built into the car) and specially trained fitters (because of'elfnsafety). The bill? That'll be 21,000 smackers, guv. Next, a gentleman describing himself as the ‘happy owner’ of a 14,000-mile BMWi3 wrote to Autocar about what happened after his drivetrain warning light came on. His main dealer had the car for four weeks while replacing the ECU and the electric motor. That was 17,000 smackers – and it didn't even solve the problem. An engineer from BMW head office diagnosed a faulty battery-cooling…

La Foce was the Tuscan home of Iris Origo, which she immortalised in her wartime memoir War in the Val d'Orcia. In the 1920s, she commissioned Cecil Pinsent to design the world-famous gardens. Four years ago, her granddaughter renovated the 15th-century villa and its outbuildings, and they are now available to rent. So we snapped up an available week. We will have the Origos’ home to ourselves, and will be able to swim in the pool and wander through the gardens, while looking across the valley and its famous zigzag road which features on so many book jackets. Not to be missed. ITINERARY Friday 13th October – arrival Morning flight to Rome; late lunch at the villa followed by tour of the garden. Saturday 14th October – Perugia and Assisi…

Alone in a copse in the park at Woburn Abbey, Bedfordshire, stands a Corinthian temple. Built in 1916 by the Duchess of Bedford, it honours a pet Pekingese. A bronze effigy of the dog, by Paul van de Kerckhove, lies atop a stone plinth on which are inscribed both his dynastic and his familiar names, Che Foo and Wuzzy. We read that he was born in 1904 and died in 1916. The memorial has a stepped, circular base. Six Corinthian columns, carved with decorative bands and linked by benches – on which to sit sadly – supported by lion's feet, encircle the tomb. A stone frieze of bows, fruit and flowers carries the dome of wrought-iron work; no mean monument to a peke. On her dog's demise, the Duchess made…

Kenneth Cranham (p17) is one of our leading actors. He was in Oliver! and starred in Shine on Harvey Moon. On stage, he's appeared in Loot, Entertaining Mr Sloane and An Inspector Calls. Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones (p18) is known as the Black Farmer. He farms on the Devon-Cornwall border. Born in Jamaica and brought up in Birmingham, he was a BBC producer of food and drink shows. Amelia Butler-Gallie (p31) is a postgraduate at Lincoln College, Oxford. She is doing an MA in 18th-century literature. In this issue, she writes about the threat to Virgil and Homer at Oxford. Elinor Goodman (P32) was political edi tor of Channel 4 News from 1988 to 2005. She is a regular presenter of The Week in Westminster and was a member of the Leveson…

Grumpy Oldie Man This time, it struck me at 4.30am – the halfway mark of a refreshing five-hour sojourn in A&E – I truly mean it. Admittedly, I'd been equally convinced that I meant it on three vaguely similar occasions in the last couple of years. The ultrasound on the testicular lump (epididymal cyst). The ECG to investigate cardiac arrhythmia (nothing lethal). The gastroscope after years of acid reflux (tiny duodenal polyp). Each time, I believed I meant it when, while striking the cowardly atheist's classic deal with God, I swore to the deity in whom I unbelieve that, if I could dodge the bullet, a radical metamorphosis would ensue. This time, however, I really, really meant it. The development that took me to the Royal Free, in the smug…

Sixty-five years ago, many cinemagoers wanted to avoid the supporting feature for the Danny Kaye vehicle Merry Andrew. That supporting feature – Blind Spot (1958) – was standard B-film fare, with scenery costing approximately 5/6d. The only redeeming element was the last-minute revelation of the villain, nicely underplayed by a tall, fair-haired actor billed 13th in the opening credits. It was the great Michael Caine, who will turn 90 on 14th March. ‘Michael Caine-spotting’ is a pastime familiar to those of us who appreciate British cinema of the 1950s and early 60s. Caine did national service between 1952 and 1954, seeing active service in Korea. After he'd left the army, it was a long, hard slog before he hit the big time. Before the release of Zulu in January 1964,…

‘Molest me, Les. Molest me in my workplace, you dirty old devil!’ The replay on the CCTV screen froze on a shot of my bum. The boardroom at Oz House was as full as a pommy complaints box – with Australian dignitaries, all old mates, shitting themselves. Otherwise, the boardroom was very quiet. On the screen, I recognised Chantelle Pugh, one of my nubile PAs and a trusted member of Team Patterson. I looked around the room. There was the picture of Betty Windsor on the wall; some bastard had forgotten to replace it with Charlie. Naturally, on the evidence of the hidden CCTV camera, my politico colleagues were a bit concerned that their own extra-curricular activities were similarly under electronic scrutiny. Most, if not all, research assistants in the…

Mary Killen's Cosmetic Tips I was watching daytime television, as a way of decompressing, when a charming old boy in a three-piece tweed suit appeared on the screen. He was sitting by a crackling log fire in a book-filled room with a dog at his feet as he answered, in alert and genial manner, the questions of his interviewer. I was just thinking to myself, ‘I wonder if he's a widower?’ as I called to mind an elderly spinster friend who might be just up his street. But, as the camera moved into close-up, I saw something stuck onto the centre of the adorable man's forehead. Pale-pink-coloured and conical, it protruded about two inches from his head, with a diameter of about three inches. What on earth was it filled…

Town Mouse When I was a younger mouse, so much younger than today, I didn't need much help from anyone, in any way. I was fairly self-sufficient in my Devon life: growing vegetables, teaching myself ukulele, chopping logs for exercise and, rather than indulging in costly therapy or counselling, turning to a combination of books and beer to ease my burdens. These days, now in London, possibly because I'm not so self-assured, I need an awful lot of help in life. I woke up the other morning and counted up the dizzying array of consultants, specialists, doctors, coaches and other professionals I seem to require in order to keep healthy in mind, body and spirit. There were loads of them. I counted that I'd used the services of 14 over…

Jem Clarke is in his very, very early fifties, is five foot zero inches tall and has never left the family home in Cleethorpes, which he shares with his parents… Mother is often confronted, while shopping, by people she hasn't seen for decades. She runs through the checklist: grown-up children living abroad and in charge of companies; grandchildren – champion skiers; husband – recently dead; and replacement cat. The ladies then delicately ask, ‘Does your youngest still live with you?’ It's decades since they've seen my mother and these cheeky Nostradamusin-drae figures nail it every time. Mother says, ‘Yes,’ and adds, ‘He's no longer in the box room. He's in the second-largest bedroom now.’ No mention of me being Cleethorpes's first national columnist (in The Oldie); nor my 2005 Flair's…

Gloria Dei est vivens homo – ‘The glory of God is man fully alive.’ That's the best-known quotation from St Irenaeus's theological work Against Heresies. A controversial figure during his lifetime in the second century AD, St Irenaeus was made a Doctor of the Church by Pope Francis in 2022. That gives him the distinction of being the most ancient of all the Doctors of the Church. I had never come across this famous saying until I began my Carmelite noviciate. It was writ large on the noviciate noticeboard. It struck me then as a fairly straightforward ideal, and something to aspire to. Accompanied as it was by a picture of a leaping athlete, it left me at the age of 37 hoping that becoming fully alive didn't involve spending…

Either the camera will dance – or I will. Fred Astaire on how to film his dance sequences Beauty is not the only thing in life. Money, power, intelligence, humour … these are forms of beauty, too. Charles Aznavour The rules [of manners], laid down clearly, reached back to a time before we could remember, so that following them wasn't painful. Diana Athill For Americans, the most important thing is to be sincere and the worst is to be pretentious. For the British, the most important thing is to be sincere and the worst is to be boring. But, for Americans, English witticisms are pretentious and, for the British, American sincerity is boring. An anony mous Cambridge professor on his return from teaching at Harvard It was not till 887,…

Media Matters One successful British export to the United States is journalists. They don't attract any tariffs under World Trade Organisation rules. The latest person to be dispatched westwards is Emma Tucker, who is swapping the editor's chair at the Sunday Times for that at the Wall Street Journal. Both titles are owned by Rupert Murdoch. Though not an experienced financial journalist, she has her admirers in Fleet Street, and may bring a lighter touch to a business newspaper that can still be rather stodgy. Actually, while Ms Tucker is the first woman to be appointed editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal, she isn't the first Briton. Her predecessor but one, Gerard Baker, also hails from our shores. Murdoch's most senior executive in the US, Robert Thomson, is an erstwhile…

Only a month ago we were mourning the sudden death of Andrew Nickolds. He was co-creator of Ed Reardon's Week, the best satire on a freelance writer's life since – well, since George Gissing's New Grub Street, on whose character Edwin Reardon the modern Ed was based. Now, even before Andrew's ashes have finished smouldering in a Cambridge crematorium, we hear of the death, in Bruges, of Victor Lewis-Smith at 65. There is a species of humour that flourishes at the BBC despite its exploitation of the corporation's pomposities and absurdities. The late Ned Sherrin, Clive Anderson, Russell Davies and Ian Hislop all practised this: as did the late lamented Humph, Spike Milligan, Willie Rushton – and indeed the whole I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue team. To satirise without belittling,…

It was Apollo's pursuit of Daphne, who escaped him by changing into a laurel tree, that spawned the laurel wreaths used as rewards for the military heroes, athletes and poets of ancient Greece. Hence laureate and baccalaureate and the herb Lauras nobilis, in French laurier, which we call bay. Unlike parsley and thyme, the other two components of the traditional bouquet garni, bay is not usually grown from seed but can be propagated from cuttings in late summer. A standard bay tree growing in a pot, about three feet in height, should not cost more than £40. We have had one by the front door for a few years which produces pale yellow flowers in spring and little berries in au tumn. A regular feed of liquid seaweed extract throughout…

Thanks to our capricious climate, you may be reading this on a sun-dappled terrace in shirtsleeves (I do hope so). But now, as I gaze through frosty windows at the garden, even our fiercely territorial local cats are huddling together for warmth. I am too young to remember the bitter winter of 1962-3 but if, as a child, I ever complained about being cold, I was firmly put in my place with hyperbole reminiscent of the Four Yorkshiremen sketch, reminding me of the privations of the Big Freeze. My grandparents had survived that winter, so family legend had it, only because of a case of sherry. They lived in Bristol, in a terraced house with just a few fireplaces for warmth and a temperamental geyser for occasional hot water. But my…

A new year is the time to make predictions for the next 12 months. But, as somebody once said, prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. Looking back at my past prophecies is a salutary business. Some years ago, I predicted that, as filters improve, spam emails might soon become a thing of the past. That was hopelessly optimistic. If anything, the opposite has happened. In the digital world, developments are as hard to foresee as anywhere. Throughout the industry, people with large brains are constantly working on new ways to use this relatively new thing called the internet. So, this year, rather than trying to guess what will happen, I'll list some things that won't happen. Frankly, I'm more likely to be right. First, local newspaper websites will…

Is there anythingyou can't leave home without? My long-haired miniature dachshund, Maurice. I paid huge amounts of money to bring him from America to England last summer. He's even been to the Palio in Siena. Is there somethingyou really miss? My family, my mum [Teresa Wells, sister of the late Alexander Chancellor, the former Oldie editor] and my siblings – or you think you do. What are your memories of Alexander Chancellor, your uncle? His crazy laugh [she cackles like him], playing the piano, smoking loads of cigarettes, and going to stay with them in Italy. Do you travel light? I wish I travelled light; I normally have a sticker on my bag saying HEAVY. What's vour favourite destination? East Sussex, where all my brothers and sisters come together to…

I recall a biology class leading up to my O Level. We were doing a self-marked test. Not a model student at the time, I was reading a bridge book and had made no effort (of which I am not proud). ‘Please read out your mark,’ said the teacher. The highest mark before we got to R for Robson had been 96. ‘98,’ I said brazenly. There was hush, as I was known to be an underachieving student. ‘Let me have a look,’ said the surprised teacher. My entirely blank sheet did not go down well and a trip to the headmaster was immediate. (PS: although my grade in the mock O Level was Unclassified and the school did not want me to take the O Level, I was determined…

Taking a Walk Imagine the Scottish coast. If you're a southern tourist like me, you'll picture the drama of the west coast and the romance of its islands. So a walk on its east coast was an education, and a revelation. I began by parking on the pier in the comely fishing village of Collieston, north of Aberdeen. Read that sentence again, oh lovers of Cornwall, and envisage a miraculous universe where you can still find a free space on the harbourside for your car. The fishwives of Collies ton once trudged inland with wicker rucksacks full of the catch of the day, to exchange for meat or cash from farmers’ wives. The fishing has gone now and, when I visited, Collieston harbour was populated by cold-water wives standing neck-deep…

Ask Virginia He won't stop working Q My husband has always been a workaholic, spending long hours at the office, and away on business. I'd long dreamed of the day we could at last have time to ourselves, being able to travel, spend relaxing evenings watching television together, go out to nice restaurants and visit our grandchildren. But now he's retired, it seems he has no intention of letting up. For the last six months, he's signed up to all kinds of duties, delivering food to food banks, visiting lonely old people, driving them to hospital appointments and so on. Now he's just dropped the bombshell – he says he's going to apply to be a local councillor! When he told me, I felt like weeping. I feel I might as…

Man in lederhosen sought The Press (York) Call for new Welcome to Colne signs Burnley Express Stunned detectorist finds hoard of old porn mags Sun £15 for published contributions NEXT ISSUE The March issue is on sale on 8th February 2023. GET THE OLDIE APP Go to App Store or Google Play Store. Search for Oldie Magazine and then pay for app. OLDIE BOOKS The Very Best of The Oldie Cartoons, The Oldie Annual 2023 and other Oldie books are available at: www.theoldie.co.uk/readers-corner/shop Free p&p. OLDIE NEWSLETTER Go to the Oldie website; put your email address in the red SIGN UP box. HOLIDAY WITH THE OLDIE Go to www.theoldie.co.uk/courses-tours…

WHAT WAS Noblesse Oblige? The phrase Noblesse Oblige first appears in a Balzac novel, Le Lys dans la Vallée (1836). An elderly aristocrat tries to sum up for a younger friend how to live. The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as ‘Noble ancestry constrains to honourable behaviour; privilege entails responsibilities.’ Why is the concept originally French? It's related to the idea of chivalry, the word itself deriving from the French word for horseman, chevalier (from the lateLatin caballarius). This word doubled as a term for a member of a higher social class, as it did with the Greeks and Romans. The code of chivalry, familiar to us from Arthur's knights and Pre-Raphaelite paintings, dated from the end of the 12th century, but was never codified. It derived from the medieval…

In February, I'll be performing a selection of poems by Rudyard Kipling, Wilfred Owen and Robert Lowell and I'll read prose by J B Priestley. The show explores the poignant experience of human beings in war. The first third of the show will be Kipling. His poems take me back to Bill Gaskill (1930-2018), the theatre director at the National Theatre and the Royal Court. I was in eight plays directed by Bill, including a part as Len in Saved by Edward Bond at the Royal Court. The last production Bill directed was his own funeral service. For his list of chosen readings, he wrote, ‘Kenneth Cranham – Kipling’. He didn't say which one. So I chose Kipling's When Earth's Last Picture Is Painted, with the lines: When Earth's last…

In 1989, I moved from the country to live in a mansion-block flat in Battersea, with my family and bull terrier, Parker. Through Parker and his canine friends I met a variety of local people, including many of my neighbours. There was one who commanded attention, and I often saw him walking in Battersea Park where we exercised our dogs. He was tall and well-built with broad shoulders and long limbs. Nobody approached him, as he looked forbidding and seemed quite private. He usually carried a football and was always accompanied by his small dog. One day, when I was in the park talking to a neighbour, this impressive looking man passed us. ‘Do you know who that is?’ my neighbour said, once the coast was clear. ‘He's John McVicar.’…

In the autumn of 1984, the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was invited to be the guest of honour at Harrow's annual School Songs. I was at the school at the time. Churchill Songs, as the event is known, involves the whole school together singing from the school songbook, followed by an address from a person of note with links to the school, on a topic of their choice. School security (such as it was – there wasn't much) was ramped up. On the Tuesday (Songs was on the Thursday), our custodian (known as Custos) was in Speech Room, where Songs is held. In walked a man with a strong Northern Irish accent, asking if he could be shown round the school as he might be interested in enrolling his…

Country Mouse I love clichès – in fact, with a number of friends I communicate exclusively in cliches. It's like a private language. ‘A moment of impatience – a lifetime of remorse’ is one of my favourites and seems to be appropriate to so many everyday situations. This cliche harks back 50 years ago to 1973, when British Rail had a poster showing the agonised face of a passenger who had flung open the carriage door before the train had stopped. A woman on the platform is seen falling backwards onto her head. I use it to advise people trying to get into overwrapped packaging with a carving knife, or having difficulty parking. ‘Too young to be a hippie, too old to be a punk’ is another favourite. It's a…

Sophia Waugh: School Days We've just been subjected to what the authorities call a ‘deep dive’. In reality, it is yet another ‘mocksted’. Where a full Ofsted inspection would examine the whole school at once, the mocksted takes place department by department, creeping insidiously around the corridors. Most of the brunt of it falls on the head of department, who has to deal with the data, the curriculum and reasons for absolutely everything, but it is still an undoubted strain on the minions. No matter how much ‘the grown-ups’ as I (perhaps ironically) call them assure us that it is ‘business as usual’, we can't help but feel Watched and Judged. The dreading is worse than the actual observation. No actress worth her salt would flinch at an audience, and…

Property-developer, philanthropist and racehorse-owner Sir Robert Ogden co-owned See More Business, which won the 1999 Cheltenham Gold Cup. He was responsible for the £7-million Sir Robert Ogden Macmillan Centres for cancer patients in Harrogate and Northallerton. He invested in London Docklands and helped persuade Canadian real-estate tycoon Paul Reichman to build Canary Wharf. Accountant Fergus Cohan gave the eulogy at his memorial service in York Minster. He joined the Ogden Group as company secretary 50 years ago, eventually becoming Sir Robert's right-hand man. Colvin said in his eulogy, ‘Robert was an exceptionally astute businessman. He was also a great leader. We had the unique Ogden way of doing things. ‘Did Robert have psychic powers or was it some sort of trick? The Uri Geller camp believed in psychic powers, and…

‘Who the hell are you? What do you think you're doing here?’ shouted Sir Alex Ferguson. I looked over my shoulder. An interloper had got into Manchester United's Cliff training ground and was about to be ejected by the biggest name in English football. I, on the other hand, had a legitimate reason for being in the Scot's presence. It was July 1994, and I was a 15-year-old from County Kerry, Ireland, on the last day of my trial at Manchester United. Later that day, I would have my first proper encounter with Ferguson. The chief scout for Ireland – my chaperone in Manchester – arranged for himself, me and three other players to meet ‘the boss’. When we entered Ferguson's office, he was behind his desk, smiling warmly. He…

Green bins make me see red. The owner of the bin is throwing away a valuable resource – brown gold – and paying someone (about 50 quid a year) to take it away. Some garden waste needs to be removed: branches, roots and soon. But that can be done via an occasional trip to the municipal tip. Disabled? Can't drive? Then the person who cut the branches and uprooted the roots could do it. How angry I am to see owners of big fat Volvos unloading grass cuttings at the tip. Why not put them on your very own compost heap? Or, better, leave the cuttings on the grass to nourish the next generation. There's really no need for green bins. Most green bins contain grass cuttings, leaves and weeds…

Compton Verney, to 7th May Connoisseurship is a word that you don't hear often nowadays, because it's deemed elitist and exclusionary. However, even Wikipedia admits that ‘in the art trade, expert connoisseurship remains a crucial skill for the identification and attribution to individual artists of works by style and technique’. So it is admirable to find an exhibition that aims to develop that skill in its visitors. In his 1969 The English Icon, Sir Roy Strong identified eight previously unattributed early-Elizabethan portraits as the work of a single artist, whom he labelled the Master of the Countess of Warwick after an example at Woburn Abbey. That was connoisseurship in action and more followed, since the Master is now credited with about 50 – mostly female – portraits. Among the rare…

Tuck up in a cosy corner of the ki tchen with a fortifying bowl of soup. And read two books about what it means to be English at table. Emma Kay's sturdy, pocket-sized paperback, Fodder & Drincan, dives deep in to the Anglo-Saxon way of life. The other, Diane Purkiss's handsome hardback English Food: A People's History, supplies the nuts and bolts of our much-maligned culinary habits. Both are as entertaining as they are erudite. Kay examines the state of the nation in early medieval times. When Alfred the Great styled himself King of the Anglo-Saxons, then as now a great gulf separated rich from poor and poverty led to starvation. The population was diverse: a gallimaufry of Scandinavian, Germanic, French, Flemish, Celts and Roman immigrants from the Mediterranean. While…

There is no more terrifying sporting place of work than a ski-jump tower. Forget walking out at Wembley with 80,000 voices bellowing out their affiliation. Never mind the summit of an Alpine climb in the Tour de France before you make the descent. The top of a 10-metre diving board, petrifying as it might be as you stand on the edge looking down way below on to the water, is nothing in comparison. Up at the top of a tower, wai ting to jump, is on another level entirely. I climbed to the top of an Olympic tower many moons ago and the thought of it still brings me out in a cold sweat. I was in Oslo to interview Willi Railo, the Norwegian professor who was SvenGoran Eriksson's psychologist…

IN COMPETITION No 288, you were invited to write a poem called Always Carry Water. For Paul Holland it was simple: ‘Always carry water is terrible advice/It's the same weight as beer and doesn't taste as nice.’ So it was for Jennifer Coville: ‘Personally I like to have two hands free/so carrying water is never for me!’ David Dixon put such advice among other nannying directives, such as ‘And if you put a deckchair up/Make sure your fingers don't get stuck.’ Max Ross thought it ‘a useful metaphor;/Even when you live in peacetime/Realise there might be war.’ Commiserations to them and to Susan Greenhill, Katie Mallett and Con Connell, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of Chambers Dictionary going to Bill…