Innehållsförteckning för November 2023 från The Oldie

Gyles Brandreth's Diary I am not planning an affair but if I were, I'd have Hannah Rothschild in my sights. She is brilliant (the first female chair of the National Gallery). She is beautiful (the evidence is there on Google). She is witty (her novels have been compared to those of Evelyn Waugh, Nancy Mitford and Jane Austen). She is generous (her philanthropy has brought her a welldeserved CBE). And she is only 14 years my junior, which is just about respectable (isn't it?) when you are in your seventh or eighth decade. Of course, I wouldn't have a chance. I know that: I am not a complete idiot. But the fantasy floated into my head unbidden when, the other day, at the Barnes BookFest in south-west London, I was…

WHAT IS the Wilford Brimley line? The Wilford Brimley line is a staging post in midlife. A person crosses the Wilford Brimley line when they reach the age of 50 years, nine months and six days – or 18,530 days. Celebrities who have recently crested the Wilford Brimley line include Liam Gallagher, Idris Elba, Eminem, Geri Halliwell, Zinedine Zidane and Cameron Diaz. Congratulations, one and all. Brimley was an American actor, who served as a Marine in the 1950s before working his way into the movies as a stuntman, extra, and eventually, character actor, specialising in ‘grumpy old man’ roles. The high point of his career was playing the lead in Ron Howard's sci-fi caper Cocoon (1985), about a group of elderly people who find an alien elixir in a…

Stop all the clocks … The Good Food Guide has ceased publication. Waitrose, which bought the Guide from Which? in 2013, has decided ‘to focus on our other publications, Waitrose Food and Waitrose Weekend‘. The truth is that, in common with Michelin and Time Out, they were giving all their hard-earned information away free on their website – and still are. Most people Google ‘restaurants near me’ and choose the one with the highest score out of five. That army of volunteer inspectors must now stand down. I was brought up with the Guides; at home there used to be an entire bookshelf of them in chronological order. The font of the title anxiously evolved from the conservative fifties, through the hip sixties and the Day-Glo seventies, only to retreat…

At this year's Rugby World Cup Final on 28th October, the winner of the Webb Ellis Cup will be celebrating 200 years after William Webb Ellis's sporting breakthrough. In 1823, Webb Ellis, in the words of the commemorative stone at his old school, ‘with a fine disregard for the rules of football as played in his time, first took the ball in his arms and ran … thus originating the distinctive feature of the Rugby Game.’ Or did he? There's a degree of Arthurian myth about the origins of the world's ninth most popular sport, played competitively in more than 100 countries. William Webb Ellis (1806-72) was real enough. We know he was up at Rugby as a ‘foundationer’ (scholarship boy) and that the game he was playing that autumn…

What do Demosthenes, President Biden, Ed Sheeran and I have in common? A stutter. We are a select bunch: about one in every hundred. Although nowadays I rarely stutter, like an evil gremlin it still lurks in the background, ready to ambush me when I am tired or stressed. Stuttering is now understood to be a neurological condition, meaning that the wires in the speech-related parts of the brain are not connected quite correctly. It is not because of a psychological flaw or a sign of character weakness. Most children who stutter will grow out of it, but if it develops into adulthood, then it is almost impossible to cure. My stutter started at boarding school in West Sussex when I was 11, some 40 years ago. I am still…

Mary Killen's Beauty Tips It is too late for my own hands, owing to my failure as a younger woman to wear rubber gloves when washing up. It's not the hot water that causes the problem – otherwise our whole bodies would be dehydrated and wrinkled by hot baths. It's the combination of the hot water with the detergent that causes the damage. Hair can be dyed, bodies can be rendered agile and taut through Pilates, teeth can be carefully curated but, after necks, hands are the biggest giveaway to our true age. And, unlike necks, we can't cover them up. Not that one's true age matters, of course. It's just that we don't want to depress others – or ourselves – by the memento mori incurred by the sight…

Postcards from the Edge The art of the street mural has broken out in Deal, where a posho culinary restaurant, The Rose, has adorned its gable end with a picturesque mural displaying a lighthouse and a seascape. Meanwhile Kent's excellent Museum of the Moving Image, reopening after renovation, recently unveiled a huge gable-end mural of Buster Keaton, a landmark image visible to anyone alighting from the train. Ben Dickson, the artist who painted the 30ft Keaton mural, also painted a striking mural of Somerset Maugham in Whitstable, the location of Maugham's classic novel Cakes and Ale (and where that author grew up). I happen to be in possession of a shabby gable-end myself, and am contemplating having it decorated with a large illustrative mural. Since Belfast pioneered this wall art,…

Oldies like me born in the 1940s often reflect on changes they have seen. Soft lavatory paper was an improvement on the hard Bronco, but you cannot fold it over a comb to make a harmonica. As for duvets, which we first met on European visits, we were sure they would never catch on at home. Nail polish is almost universal now, whereas the headmistress of my sister's school in Cambridge said that red nail polish was the first step towards prostitution. King George V called Wallis Simpson ‘a divorced American with painted nails’. The attitude to smoking has utterly changed. And something else that seems to have gone out of fashion in my lifetime is circumcision. I was born at home in 1945. It was before the National Health…

A memorial service was held at St George's, Hanover Square, for Andrew Edmunds, print expert and proprietor of Andrew Edmunds Restaurant and the Academy Club in Soho. The staff of the Academy and the restaurant, alongside some of Soho's finest surviving boulevardiers, bellowed out Jerusalem in his memory. The Rev Roderick Leece took the service. The wine merchant Matthew Jukes recalled his first visit to the Academy, founded by Auberon Waugh: ‘I was immediately struck by the shabbiness, the unique atmosphere, and the peacefulness of this beautiful building. ‘I loved the simple décor, Andrew's wonderful prints on the walls, his beautiful flowers and the quaint, dishevelled feel that permeated every inch of this tiny club. ‘It was heart-movingly honest, with a genuine and unforced sense of place, and, importantly, the…

It was the mid-1980s and I was in the Colston Hall (not a name to bandy about in these Black Lives Matter times) in Bristol, barely a stone's throw from the statue of Edward Colston – in storage now after being dumped in the city docks. I had come to see a concert by the Drummers of Burundi, then darlings of the world-music scene. The Drummers were brilliant but in the end their routines were repetitive … and my attention started to wander. That was when I noticed a blonde woman in a dark beret sitting just in front of me, wreathed in cigarette smoke – in those days you could still smoke at gigs. From behind, she was the spitting image of Joni Mitchell. But it couldn't be, could…

History ‘If we have come to think that the nursery and the kitchen are the natural sphere of a woman, we have done so exactly as English children come to think that a cage is the natural sphere of a parrot: because they have never seen one anywhere else.’ That was Bernard Shaw setting out his feminist credentials in 1891. Shaw definitely meant well, and he even recognised that, often, the last thing women wanted was a man to do their speaking up for them. Although he liked to think of himself as a challenger to John Stuart Mill in his support for women's rights, he also boasted he was ‘as sound a Feminist as Mary Wollstonecraft’, the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women (and the mother…

Agincourt: Battle of the Scarred King By Michael Livingston Osprey £20 The tale is a familiar one – of a beleaguered and outnumbered English army, led by the heroic Henry V, trouncing the ‘flower of French chivalry’ through bulldog tenacity and withering volleys of longbow arrows. Shakespeare used this, the ultimate victory-against-the-odds, as the backbone of his Henry V. Winston Churchill encouraged Laurence Olivier to make a stirring film of the same, as a morale-booster in the Second World War. It was filmed during the months that saw D-Day blossom into the Allied invasion through Normandy. Agincourt is a story that has made the English proud, for more than 600 years. There have been many excellent books on the battle. In recent times, Juliet Barker's Agincourt and Bernard Cornwell's fictional…

I worry about Nadiya Hussain MBE. Not since Byron woke up to find himself famous have we seen such instant celebrity. Her take-off after Bake Off has been vertical and, thus far, not a single thing has gone wrong. Nor did a single thing go wrong for Nadiya in the 2015 final of The Great British Bake Off, when she produced those perfect raspberry millefeuilles and that jewel-encrusted, triple-tiered lemondrizzle wedding cake. Nadiya had never heard of a millefeuille before she was watched by 13.4 million people making one, nor had she ever travelled in a taxi, train or tube without her husband, or been away from home without her children. The four-foot-11 mother of three, with her hijab, arranged marriage and Luton accent, is now the symbol of modern…

Hastings Contemporary, to 12th November Sir Quentin Blake will always be associated with Roald Dahl, just as John Tenniel, the first illustrator to be knighted (in 1893), was always linked with Lewis Carroll. In fact, they both did a lot beyond the Carroll and Dahl books in their long careers. In December, Blake will be 91, and he is still working to secure the future of the great project he founded as the House of Illustration in 2002. Having overrun, this should reopen as the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration in 2025. It will be housed in the splendid 18th-century New River Head pump house behind Sadler's Wells in Clerkenwell. As part of a very successful fundraising campaign, Blake has so far held two auctions of specially-drawn work at Bonhams.…

Aside from the cricket, Pakistan isn't usually in the news for peaceful reasons. That makes food-writer Sumayya Usmani's Andaza, a memoir with (just a few) recipes, of rather more than culinary interest. Her earlier, much-praised cookbook, Summers Under the Tamarind Tree, defined a culinary tradition already well known from the ‘Indian’ curry houses in every British high street. So what's the difference? Meat-eating, most obviously, since Pakistan is Muslim, and India, being predominantly Hindu, is vegetarian by orientation, even if not in practice. In other words, it's complicated. Sumayya's early life was peripatetic, spent mostly on the high seas on a merchant ship captained by her father. Her mother prepared delicious dishes for the family on a one-ring stove, with very limited ingredients, which taught her daughter to cook with…

One of the real joys of being a fan of sport is losing yourself in its minutiae. Wallowing in past achievement, treasuring history, diving into previously unvisited corners: nothing delivers quite the room for nerdery that sport does. This is what draws so many of us to games: losing ourselves in their nooks and crannies. But, like much of modern life, the very essence of sporting nerdery is changing. And not for the better. Data is taking over the reporting of sport. Like many a new trend, this one hails from America. In every pursuit now, interpretation of the action comes smothered by statistics – not old-school stats, like batting averages or numbers of sets won. This is a peculiar new insistence – data used to analyse what should have…

National Savings and Investments (NS&I) tops the best-buy savings tables. That is not a headline you see very often – and it might not still be true by the time you read this, because the highstreet banks are fighting back. But at last there is good news for savers. NS&I was, until 1969, the Post Office Savings Bank. It split with the Post Office and became a government department called the National Savings Bank, renamed National Savings and Investments in 2002. Its sole purpose is to attract money for the Government to spend. Usually, the rates from National Savings are middling, as the Government does not like to use its weight to disrupt the wider savings market. That changed this year. The Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Financial Conduct…

IN COMPETITION No 298 you were invited to write a poem called Luggage. It was a large and enjoyable postbag. I laughed at Fiona Clark's muffled train announcement of a capybara, which turned out to be a café-bar. But she remembered to keep her luggage with her at all times. Ian Nalder recalled luggage before the war ‘made of heavy leather / Bound with metal clasps and belting which milord or lady never / Actually had to carry!’ Con Connell artfully made the overweight piece of hand baggage his narrator. David Silverman gave us Luggage as Cargoes: ‘Stately leather steamer trunk from Louis Vuitton’. Robert Major mischievously rhymed upgrades and Hades. Commiserations to them and to Dorothy Pope, Peter Hollindale, Ann Drysdale, I White, Daphne Lester, Jenny Jones, Paul Holland,…

How to Survive a Classic Crime Novel by Kate Jackson (British Library, £12.99) is for those with groaning shelves of golden-age crime novels. Kate Jackson has plundered the works of Ngaio Marsh, Margery Allingham and others to give tips on how the reader might survive a murder mystery: and what reader hasn't sometimes given that some thought? Red herrings, hidden identities and police interrogations, all the clues are contained within. And on that subject, GT Karber's Murdle: More Killer Puzzles: 100 Fiendishly Foul Murder Mystery Logic Puzzles will test the wits of the armchair sleuth with a follow-up to the bestselling and addictive 100 Devilishly Devious Murder Mystery Logic Puzzles (both Souvenir Press, £14.99). Little Toller books are always beautiful – inside and out. Among its recent volumes is All…

ELISABETH LUARD selects the best festive delicacies Perfect puds Fraser's Christmas puds prepared to an old family recipe – maybe even better than your own and certainly a lot less trouble – are lusciously dark and appley, nutty, fruity, spicy and thoroughly laced with stout, cider and rum. The Fraser ladies of the current generation have replaced the usual beef-suet with sunflower oil, which makes the puddings suitable for vegetarians. A family business garlanded with eco-awards, the shop and mail-order business are a mother-and-daughter enterprise based on the family farm in Kent using local produce, including free-range eggs. A dear little half-pounder for two clocks in at £8, a one-pounder to serve four at £11.75 (includes delivery, normally extra), and *OLDIE DISCOUNT* we have an Oldie special two-pounder to serve…

During Christmases of the 1950s and 1960s, Northern Irish children knew nothing of present mountains. What we did know about was dancing and skipping for weeks in anticipation of the one present we knew we would get. This surprise sat tantalisingly below the tree for up to a week beforehand. We didn't even dare secretly to unknot the twine and peek inside. It's funny to think of now but, in the past, children used to obey their parents rather than the other way around. In my household, we were also excited by the arrival of a group of semi-comatose guests, who would be propped like so many sacks of potatoes, around the glowing coal fire. These were residents of the local nursing home who had no family to go to…

Youngsters should gift the oldies in their lives something practical or frivolous; oldies should indulge the young with something enduring. But what? I've been seeking inspiration from a throng of mixed-aged gardening and ‘outdoorsy’ friends. ‘I can't walk all the way over there,’ said Maude, an octogenarian friend curious to see what the bold blue splashes were in a herbaceous border on the other side of a tennis-courtsized lawn in a garden we were visiting for the first time. I passed her my binoculars. ‘Ah, they're asters, indispensable September gems.’ I often have binos with me in the garden, not just for spotting birds or identifying the very occasional low-flying aircraft or ogling boats on the distant estuary, but also to scan a tree's canopy, especially in spring when out-of-reach…

It seems astonishing that fresh-faced, pop rascals Blur, such a threat to the Old Guard with their rambunctious, Kinks-coloured, music-hall hits Country House and Parklife, have been in business for 33 years. They're now firmly part of the establishment, themselves filling Wembley Stadium twice this summer. Periodically they overcome internal tensions to make records as good as The Ballad of Darren, Damon Albarn sounding, as ever, as if slightly bored by the irksome rigours of the outside world, and the group delivering huge, chunky but elegant pop tunes – strident, bracing, symphonic – with powerful echoes of David Bowie. You can imagine the Lemon Twigs’ record collection too, their new album, Everything Harmony, so effortlessly light, dramatic and tuneful that they must have been brought up on the Byrds, Beach…

Lulu Taylor (p32) is a Sunday Times bestselling novelist, editor and interviewer. Her latest book, The Forgotten Tower, is published on November 23rd. She lives in Dorset. Jonathan Meades (p52) is author of Pedro and Ricky Come Again: Selected Writing 1988-2020 and The Plagiarist in the Kitchen. His TV films include Travels with Pevsner: Worcestershire. Earl Spencer (p55) is author of The White Ship – Conquest, Anarchy and the Wrecking of Henry I's Dream, Killers of the King and To Catch a King: Charles II's Great Escape. He lives at Althorp House. David Hepworth (p59) edited Smash Hits, launched Just Seventeen and presented Live Aid. He is author of Abbey Road Studios at 90 and 1971 – Never a Dull Moment: Rock's Golden Year.…

Few people were familiar with the name Isambard when I was growing up in the 1970s. I remember this because it was my brother's name. It almost always needed to be explained to anyone who asked, and they often did. It was also a family name, as Isambard Kingdom Brunel was my great-greatgreatgrandfather (our mother's mother's mother's mother was IKB's only daughter, Florence). It was because of this connection that I found, among my late uncle's papers, a personal letter from IKB to his son Isambard. These days, we rarely have to explain the name. Brunel is far more famous now than he was. This may reflect the changing way history is taught in schools. Most history used to be political history (the Reformation, the World Wars and so on).…

While the Women's Institute traditionally rounds off proceedings with a chorus of Jerusalem, the ritual at Oldie functions was for Barry Cryer to tell his parrot joke (‘Hello, Keith!’), which never failed to bring the house down. Barry (1935-2022) championed the magazine for a quarter of a century. He introduced luminaries at the Oldie Literary Lunches, was present at receptions and launching parties. He was unswervingly loyal to editorial staff and contributors. As his son Bob quotes Stephen Fry as saying, in this warmhearted tribute, ‘He was always welcoming to new talent in comedy. He never succumbed to envy and bitterness. He saw all comedy as one.’ This is true. Barry was appreciative and well mannered. There was never any malice or gossip-mongering. He was the sort of person who…

• The Rolling Stones, whom we'd watched on a small black-and-white-TV screen, would still be rolling 60 years later, and that Mick dagger at the age of 8o would be possibly the most famous man in the world? Or that he and so many other pop stars would receive knighthoods – Cliff Richard, Paul McCartney, Rod Stewart, Tom Jones, Van Morrison, Bono, Ray Davies, Elton John, Ringo Starr? And that when our parents said we would soon grow out of our love for the Beatles, they were wrong? • The insane rise in the value of houses would mean that being a millionaire was no big deal? • The phone would evolve from being the black Bakelite behemoth in the hall into a bafflingly ingenious portable sliver that could do…

Town Mouse A few weeks ago, I had a little scamper around Palazzo Davanzati, a 14th-century merchant's house in Florence. The Davanzatis bought the house in 1580 from a family of wealthy wool merchants who'd had it built 200 years earlier. On the first floor is the great hall, a gigantic room for business meetings with absurdly high ceilings. It makes Crispin Odey's old wood-panelled meeting room in Mayfair look like a council Portakabin. I was struck by the first and second floor. They both feature a privy or lavatory room – a private corner chamber with a wooden loo seat. This civilised facility might come as a slight surprise to those who believe that sanitary waste disposal systems were invented in London in 1860 by Victorian engineer Peter Bazalgette.…

One of Agatha Christie's lesserknown talents (along with being an early British surfer, and collector of houses – at one time she owned eight) was as a stained-glass window designer. When living in Devon, she attended the 14th-century church of St Mary the Virgin, Churston. She had long disliked the plain glass of the east window, which ‘gaped at me like a gap in teeth’, and decided in 1954 that she'd commission a design of her specifi cation. She'd pay for it by allocating the rights of a story to the diocese. She found James Paterson, who had made windows for other Devon churches. Her plan that the central figure represent the Good Shepherd was disapproved of by the Exeter Diocese, who insisted it show the crucifixion. Christie won that…

Oldie Man of Letters Last summer, I was invited to the 40th anniversary of the Edinburgh Book Festival. When I got there, my kind hosts told me I had attended the very first – making an appearance on stage with Martin Amis and John Updike, both now dead, alas. I remember thinking, 40 years ago, how weird it was asking writers to sing for their suppers. Writing is an essentially solitary activity, and it is not realistic to expect that a writer – almost by definition an introvert – will be able to perform well on stage in front of an audience. Tolstoy never made a speech in his life. Since then, literary festivals have mushroomed. There is scarcely a hamlet in the land that does not have one: and…

My seat was at the very back of the Qantas 747 jumbo Sydney to London. So there was a good chance I would have a spare seat next to me. Just as I was congratulating myself, I looked down the aisle and the last passenger to board was making his way towards me – bugger! He took his seat beside me, and I resigned myself to a cramped flight. The clink of the drinks trolley gave us an opportunity to discover a shared liking for gin and tonic – and things started to look up. It takes a long time to cross the wide brown land that is Australia, but by the time we were flying over its northern reaches, we had covered a lot of conversational territory. He liked…

2SAS: Bill Stirling and the Forgotten Special Forces Unit of World War II By Gavin Mortimer Osprey £25 Bill Stirling was my beloved grandfather, who loved to rag around with my brother and me as kids at Keir, his Scottish estate. Sadly, he died when I was just 16, before I had the wit to ask him about the war. So I was looking forward to Mortimer's book about him and 2SAS Regiment, its teething troubles, failures, and successes in raiding behind enemy lines in the Second World War. Formed in 1943, 2SAS was the younger brother of the SAS Regiment, which had been founded in 1941 by Bill's own younger brother David Stirling. Like the original unit, 2SAS lived off their wits, on missions where reaching their objectives was…

I took my mother-in-law to Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors. One of the attendants said, ‘Keep her moving, sir. We're stock-taking.’ Les Dawson Brevity is the soul of lingerie, as the Petticoat said to the Chemise. Dorothy Parker How different, how very diff erent from the home life of our own dear Queen! Said of Queen Victoria at a performance of Cleopatra by Sarah Bernhardt If it doesn't look easy, it is that we have not tried hard enough yet. Fred Astaire A fan club is a group of people who tell an actor he's not alone in the way he feels about himself. Kenneth Williams A good general rule is to state that the bouquet is better than the taste and vice versa. Stephen Potter on wine-tasting The House of…

‘Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?’ was the headline theme of this year's Edinburgh International Festival, the first to be curated by Nicola Benedetti. It comes from the title of Martin Luther King's last book. After Edinburgh's graphic designers had finished with it, it was reduced to the rather more open-ended ‘Where Do We Go from Here?’ – a question any UK arts organisation might currently be tempted to ask. Edinburgh is unique in that it hosts not one festival each August, but eight. These include the International, Fringe, and Film festivals founded in 1947, the Tattoo dating from 1950 and the Book Festival from 1984. All depend on private sponsorship, the International Festival especially so, given that local funding – what Bernard Levin called ‘Edinburgh's annual…

I had the best of news this month. I discovered that Alle Due Corti, set at the junction of two narrow streets in Lecce, Puglia, reopened its doors in May. Their three-year lockdown was finally over. The founder, Rosalba, was back at her table by the door. Her husband, Danilo, took the payments. Her daughter, Marinella, greeted us on both our visits within five days. And her son, Giorgio, served God's own dishes. Even her grandson popped in, complete with crash helmet. The menu is largely in the Leccese dialect: taiedda (instead of riso con patate e cozze), and fave nette cu le cicureddhe (instead of fave con cicoria). Rosalba's signature dish is ciceri e tria, a delicious mixture of fried and boiled tagliatelle with chickpeas. And a litre of…

This year, we celebrate five 75th birthdays of significance to the British motor industry (as was). In 1948, wartime rationing was increased by the Labour government. Steel was strictly rationed and carmakers were compelled to export. Factories that had been turned over to military production were worn out, and the few new cars available were mostly upgraded versions of pre-war models. But some minds conceived change rather than continuation. One was that of a 20-year-old engineering student, Colin Chapman, whose girlfriend's dad let him do up an old Austin 7 in an empty garage. This car, re-bodied, later became the Mark 1 Lotus. Improved versions followed, and within two years of founding the Lotus company, Chapman's cars were competing at Le Mans. Despite periods when Lotus was said to stand…

Only 1,000 pairs of the shoveler breed in the British Isles. That is a quarter of the number of mandarin-duck pairs. The winter ‘influx’ of 19,000 birds (a fifth of the north-western European population) is dwarfed by wintering teal (430,000), wigeon (445,000) and mallard (665,000). Globally, shovelers are widespread and numerous (5.9 million). But to see some – usually in passage, on an urban lake – is always an event. This is because of the thrillingly conspicuous drake, its long scapular feathers worthy of adorning the helmet of an imperial governor. Its colours are the same as those of the shelduck. One of its colloquial names is ‘sheldrake’, ‘shel’ meaning ‘variegated plumage’, from Middle Dutch schillede. No less noticeable is the spatulate bill. Thus its name Spatula clypeata – ‘spoon-shaped’/…

Taking a Walk Like Plop, the owl who was afraid of the dark in Jill Tomlinson's book, we need to be reminded of the joys of spending time outdoors when night falls. I cling to the comfort blanket of electric light as much as anyone. It took an invitation from Kim and Nick Hoare to join one of their full-moon walks to get me taking a stroll in that most foreign of lands: the night. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Dorothy and William Wordsworth pioneered walking for pleasure at night in the summer of 1797. But night strolling is the highly questionable behaviour of burglars, poachers and other deviants. The old Romantics were watched with consternation by government spies convinced it was a revolutionary plot. So joining a friendly walking group…

Across 1 Grab hold of (5) 4 Equus caballus (5) 10 Look at face to face (7) 11 Vegetable matter for beds (5) 12 Relish, zest (5) 13 Stuck to (7) 15 Crystalline compound formed in liver (4) 17 Rodeo rope (5) 19 Cunning ruses (5) 22 Loud report (4) 25 Dampen (7) 27 Small area of market (5) 29 Asparagus unit (5) 30 Hug (7) 31 Nitwit (5) 32 Intended (5) Down 2 Pitchers (5) 3 Enthusiastic, committed (7) 5 Get-up-and-go (5) 6 Binge (7) 7 Pretend (5) 8 Seaweeds (5) 9 Hue; ghost (5) 14 First light (4) 16 Gown (4) 18 Die sane (anag) (7) 20 Dishonourable; base (7) 21 Huge hit (5) 23 Wrath (5) 24 Precious stone (5) 26 The trunk (5) 28 Shackle (5)…

Ask Virginia How can I shut him up? Q I've got an old schoolfriend and I've always liked her husband, though he has always been talkative. She now has mobility problems and is confined to the house, so we can't go out to lunch à deux as we used to. The last two times I've seen her, he has provided a light lunch – and proceeded to talk and talk and talk. Last time, I don't think either she or I said more than about 50 words between us. They live quite far away and, to be honest, I now dread going over there. Is is there anything I can do? M James, Reading A Conversation is a two- (or in this case three-) way thing. Unless there is a…

Geoff Hurst: Sue Ryder In 2010, my late daughter, Claire, was cared for at a peaceful Sue Ryder hospice. The nurses and care teams made Claire as comfortable as possible, giving us precious time together as a family and allowing us to go back to being Claire's parents. The expert, compassionate palliative care and bereavement support given by this charity meant an awful lot to me and my family. sueryder.org Mary Beard: Wintercomfort for the Homeless Since the early 1990s, my local Wintercomfort has been supporting the homeless in Cambridge, with everything from housing, accessing dental treatment and writing a CV to helping homeless migrants with English lessons. Last year Wintercomfort generously accepted my surplus-to-requirements turkey for its Christmas cook-up, but it prefers cash to keep on doing what it's…

Into the woods The trees of Westonbirt Arboretum are stunning at any time of the year, but its Enchanted Christmas days take everything to another level, turning the place into a genuine winter wonderland with spariding lights and mesmerising installations. 24,25 Nov; 1,2,8,9, 15-17,19-23 Dec, 4-g.3oprn; from £19 adult, £12 child, booking essential. forestryengland.uk They think it's all over It's terrible news (except for Scrooges among us): Sorry, Christmas is Cancelled… that's the name of the show at the Carriageworks Theatre, Leeds. But the clue to its happy ending is in the rest of the title: Katie Saves the Day! Just as well, since this tale of thieves breaking into Santa's grotto and stealing all the presents is aimed at two-year-olds and upwards – who might not be able to…

What do you buy a wine-lover for Christmas? The answer might seem obvious, but there is a distinct danger that your vintage gift might fall victim to one of the many perils that stalk the festive season. Among a cavalcade of bottles, your fine red Burgundy might end up untagged and unacknowledged in the recipient's cellar; it might be consumed carelessly and unappreciatively amid bacchanalian chaos; it might even – heaven forfend – end up in the mulled wine. Thankfully, there are safer and longer-lasting gifts that are always welcome. Wine glasses, for instance: wine always tastes better from an elegantly shaped, thinrimmed glass, but they are sadly more prone to breakages than the old-school Paris goblets that you could bounce off a concrete floor, and even the most cautious…

The 400th anniversary of the death of William Byrd was well marked this year, rather better than that of his more wayward contemporary, the great English madrigalist Thomas Weelkes, who also died in 1623. Happily, amends were made by Tom + Will: Weelkes & Byrd 400 Years, a cleverly curated collection of madrigals and consort song for viols and voices by The King's Singers and our longest-serving viol consort, Fretwork. One reason why Weelkes's often erotically charged minstrelsy gets too few hearings is the sheer difficulty of the music. Not that you'd know it from these performances (Signum Classics SIGCD731, £13.50, prestomusic.com). There's a similar intimacy in the marrying of words and music in late-19th-century French art-song, or ‘Mélodie’, of which the composer Gabriel Fauré is the supreme master. It's…

1 Who was the only actor to appear in all 295 episodes of Last of the Summer Wine? 2 The album version uses the name ‘CocaCola’ and the single uses ‘cherry cola’ instead, to avoid a BBC ban. Who flew from Minneapolis to London just to sing the words ‘cherry cola’? 3 Which Scottish football team played in two FA Cup finals, in 1884 and 1885? They lost, on each occasion, to Blackburn Rovers. 4 Which day of the week was originally Jupiter's day, and still is in France? 5 What links the waltz, the fandango, the minuet, the mazurka, the polonaise and the saraband – beyond the fact that they are all dances? 6 What six-letter word is the technical term for those tiny hamburgers you get as canapés…

Cardboard left on toaster blamed for Telford house fire alert Shropshire Star Burglar who stole bag of cat litter from OAP jailed Sunderland Echo Brighton and Hove plan to tackle weeds promised Brighton Argus £15 for published contributions NEXT ISSUE The December issue is on sale on 15th November 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 2024 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 the three-day week? Fifty years ago, in November 1973, the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) began working to rule in support of its demand for a 35-per-cent pay increase. The next day, Ted Heath's Conservative government declared its fifth and final state of national emergency, with the first wave of rolling power cuts following in December. By Christmas Day, there was a 50mph speed limit on Britain's motorways, and the thermostats in centrally heated offices and businesses were meant to be set no higher than 63° Fahrenheit (17° Celsius) until further notice. The energy crisis of 1973-74 was the result of a series of domestic and international problems colliding in a perfect storm for the British consumer. In retaliation for the West's support of Israel in the October…

I've been trying to think of the right word for two weeks. And then it hit me. It's fortnight. Lot became naturally rather peeved/ When his sex life came to a halt./ Well, wouldn't you, when you had to make do/ With occasional pinches of salt? Barry's student poem in the Leeds University magazine Poetry and Audience A man is driving down a country lane and he runs over a cockerel. He goes to the farmhouse and knocks on the door. The farmer's wife answers, and the man says, ‘I appear to have run over your cockerel. Is there anything I can do to replace him?’ She says, ‘Well, please yourself. The hens are round the back.’ A woman sees this beautiful blue and gold parrot in the shop and…

Country Mouse In a thoroughly modern essay, entitled Village Hunting 1877, the Wiltshire writer and mystic Richard Jefferies anticipated the Special Places to Stay website of green-travel pioneer Alastair Sawday. A hundred years divide them, but the two men are barking up the same sort of tree. Jefferies mused on the tendency of Victorian-era pleasure-seekers always to go where somebody else has been – such as Brighton or Scarborough – instead of striking out a bold, original course for themselves. He advised these early tourists to the countryside to buy a railway map and head for the spaces between the lines where, because of inconveniently placed hills, engineers had avoided laying tracks. In these spaces, according to Jefferies, were preserved ‘good village hunting grounds’ and a chance to encounter a…

Sophia Waugh: School Days I have been very spoiled. I've had a sneaky suspicion about this for a while, but this year has forced the fact to my attention. Since moving to this school, I've never not had a top set GCSE class. Some years, I've had two sets, and then it's usually a top one and a set three. This year, I have one and a half sets, and they are set three and four. I'm not complaining; nor should I. Nevertheless, it's a bit of a shock to the system. Where for years I've been chasing grades 7 (old style A) and above, for the next two years I'll be praying for 4s and 5s. The potential grades of the students I teach this year and next range…

I looked with shocked disbelief at the live images of the Morocco earthquake broadcast on television. I watch very little television – so I come to it as if from another planet. Days later, I still find myself querying the desirability of real (as opposed to fictional) disaster being used as entertainment. What on earth were the camera crews doing, standing there filming close-ups of people who had been buried under rubble, sometimes for hours? Presumably their aim was to project the calamity and its accompanying heartbreak into people's living rooms around the world. But do these terrible disasters have to be on our screens for such great lengths of time? Do we need such details in our homes when we can give no practical or even moral support to…

The Secret Life of John le Carré By Adam Sisman Profile Books £16.99 Halfway through Adam Sisman's 2015 biography of John le Carré, something odd occurs. The book simply shuts up shop. You can all but hear the rattle of the roller shutter as if it's half-day closing. How did this happen? The short answer is that David Cornwell (le Carré's real name) got married again. Previously, at the fag end of his first marriage, he had been rambunctiously playing away with Susan Kennaway, the wife of his bosom friend James Kennaway. Both men got novels out of the ménage, and Sisman a lively chapter. Enter Jane, the second Mrs Cornwell. In the biography, and now in The Secret Life of John le Carré, Sisman describes working on the archive…

Remember swimming pools years ago? They were fun and safe for swimmers and learners, because ever-watchful attendants with whistles warned us at the slightest misbehaviour and would throw us out if we continued. Fast forward to today. Pools have increasingly become aquatic obstacle courses. Try to enjoy a relaxing swim? Forget it. Recently, at my local pool, a group of women, standing in the water, were having a nice chat, blocking the pool for swimmers. Nearby, a young couple were enthusiastically snogging in a swimming lane. I fumed and stormed out of another one where lots of hyped-up lads were throwing one another across the pool. In a third venue, I didn't dare swim as I would risk a whiplash injury or worse, if young ‘swimmers’ surfaced right underneath me…

The lunch table was full of enthusiasm. ‘John Major – such a nice man!’ gushed my daughter. ‘The Oscar Wilde trials – what an amazing story that was!’ agreed two 40-somethings. What had prompted these bursts of appreciation about (to me) familiar subjects? Podcasts: The Rest Is Politics and The Rest Is History, purveyors of revelation to the under-informed. Podcasts now get mentioned to me more often than radio programmes (apart from The Life Scientific, Desert Island Discs and Fi and Jane on Times Radio). Even fellow oldies are now listening less in real time. There's a new series of talks called Canon – as in the canon of literature, knowledge etc. The first was on Paradise Lost. ‘My generation,’ said my son-inlaw, ‘realise they don't know anything. So they…

We have had a good crop of cooking apples this year, but the eating varieties have been a bit disappointing – particularly the Spartan tree, popular with the grandchildren, which usually yields a large harvest. However, I have heard of branches weighed down by huge quantities of apples elsewhere. The early Discovery was ripening in July in southern England and, according to the keepers of the National Fruit Collection at Brogdale in Kent, apples have ripened two to three weeks earlier this year. So, did the supermarkets off er more English apples for sale in early autumn? Of course they didn't. From my survey of three local supermarkets in the first week of September, I found only one English apple – Bramley – for sale, and, in each of the…

Travellers to the waterways of south-west France might recognise the scene. I was gliding serenely on a narrowboat, sunshine blazing on the canal, as I toyed with a few oysters, a tranche of terrine and some crusty bread, a glass of something chilly and pink at hand to toast envious strangers on the towpath. And then London Zoo hove into view: to be precise, the Snowdon Aviary (now repurposed for the use of monkeys, apparently; I spotted neither avian nor simian). I was not on the Canal du Midi, but on the Regent's Canal, having lunch aboard the good ship Prince Regent. The nice folk who do the marketing for the Languedoc AOP, the appellation once known as Côteaux de Languedoc that covers a vast swathe of vineyards and wineries…

Do you travel light? Generally, yes, but because I'm away from home for seven weeks this time, I've overpacked. But, as it's all rehearsal for Stephen Sondheim's Old Friends, [which McKenzie is co-directing] I hope nobody asks me out anywhere posh. I haven't brought anything posh with me. What's your favourite destination? I come to London for holidays now, as I live on the south coast. What are your earliest childhood holiday memories? Money wasn't running around too much back then, so I think the biggest thing was the Isle of Wight. That was exotic for us. Did you always want to be on the stage? I did, but I didn't know it really. I was extremely fortunate. I had a voice when I was a kid, so I used…

I much enjoyed my afternoon at the House of Lords, almost a year ago, to watch the annual Lords-Commons match. Naturally, it was not an error-free event, but there was a common thread to several of the mistakes: failure to bid a second suit. This was Board 12 (of 24). Dealer South North-South Vulnerable The Bidding at Table One The Bidding at Table Two West leads the king of clubs and a hopeful second club. You ruff, draw trumps (the 4-0 split causing you little pain) and cross to the king-queen of diamonds; you'd be fine if East began with knave-low-low-low, as your ace-ten would now form a marked finesse position. However, the suit splits 3-2 and you are soon chalking up 12 tricks. Well bid, Michael Mates and Robin…

High time When asked what she would do if she were made Mayor of London, Jane Birkin said that she would give everyone a free balloon ride. Sadiq Khan might take some persuading – but for those with money to burn, Experience Days offers trips starting at £172 for a solo passenger – departing at dawn or dusk at locations from Cornwall to Perthshire. There is no maximum age restriction, but participants must be able ‘to climb in and out of the basket’. experiencedays.co.uk A cut above The keen gardener can never have too many clippers, and a pair of personalised Burgon & Ball National Trust secateurs with brass rivets will raise the tone of any garden shed. For the ultimate in horticultural glamour, accompany with a pair of Bradleys…

Sun! You know you crave it after our tepid summer (I don't count a scarce handful of hot days in July and September). Midwinter is the perfect time to visit South America. I finally made it to Colombia this year. I travelled around independently by public bus (we would call the vehicles coaches), which was heaven itself: one sits very high enjoying a perfect view, with aircon and a lav at the back, and cheery types get on from time to time selling cheap and delicious comestibles. Seats are easily booked online in advance (I used redbus.co – note the .co, not the .com we are used to typing). The seven-hour trip north from Mompox into Santander province, at first following the fabled River Magdalena, was a highlight, ending at…

The Driver's Seat (1974) Elizabeth Taylor's least-seen film, a veritable lost masterpiece. Andy Warhol is in the cast, along with the gurgling Mona Washbourne and the always slightly mad Ian Bannen. Based on a Muriel Spark novel, it concerns a woman travelling to Rome to search for a man who will murder her. I suppose the idea is: can a person arrange their own fate? I saw the film on a bootleg disc transferred from a blotchy VHS. It has now been lavishly remastered by the BFI, with a booklet and all sorts of fancy extras. The cinematography was by Vittorio Storaro, responsible for the lustre of Last Tango in Paris and Apocalypse Now. Summer's Lease (1989) It makes me mad. We have spent over a decade restoring a donkey…