Innehållsförteckning för March 2025 från The Oldie

A century and a half ago, when my great-great-grandfather was one of the richest men in America, he owned a house in New York City on Fifth Avenue at 55th Street. I am writing this from that very address right now. Sadly, the Brandreth mansion is long gone and my achieving forebear's Manhattan home (he had others, of course) has been replaced by a handsome hotel, the Peninsula. I'm in my room on the tenth floor, eating the ingeniously crafted miniature chocolate model of the Empire State Building that's been kindly left on my pillow as part of the turn-down service. I'm reflecting on what might have been had my father's grandfather – who was sent back to England in the 1880s to manage the European end of the Brandreth…

WHAT IS Replika? Replika is ‘the AI companion who cares’. It is a chatbot, basically – a bit like ChatGPT but with graphics: an animated face and body, blinking out at you from the screen. You can create a Replika friend or mentor, girlfriend or boyfriend, wife or husband, sister or brother. She, he or they can be as caring or as sassy, blond or muscly as you like. But Replika is ‘always here to listen and talk’. And it is ‘always on your side’. Unlike those troublesome real-world friends. It was dreamt up by a Russian émigrée named Eugenia Kuyda in 2015. She was working at an artificial-intelligence start-up in San Francisco when her beloved friend Roman died. She decided to feed all of Roman's text and emails into…

Sir Winston Churchill's state funeral was 60 years ago, on 30th January 1965. As a mounted constable, I was on duty throughout that extraordinary day. I had paraded at City Road police stables at 3am. I then rode Marquis (pictured), an imperturbable grey gelding, to Hampstead to collect another horse I led to Trafalgar Square. I was designated orderly to a deputy commander, whose mount I handed over. He was in charge of a specified section of the processional route to be taken by the funeral cortège. The primary role of the police was to maintain order. The procession, with its gun carriage hauled by Royal Navy sailors, completed the journey from Westminster with no mishaps. Police horses that were ridden for many hours that day were rested in St…

Facetiousness is a peculiarly English quality. Some languages do not even have a word for it. No surprise that these languages are spoken in lands that have dictatorships. Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis liked playing a quiz game with new acquaintances. They'd ask them who was ‘the most effing Cambridge poet’ in the English language. Nul points for those who tried to talk about Milton, or Tennyson. The answer was Matthew Effing ARNOLD. The point of the joke, to these men who thought of themselves as so intensely Oxford, was that Matthew and Arnold took Oxford ‘seriously’, and all that crap about home of lost causes and dreaming spires and Cardinal Effing Newman was the sort of precious thing a Cambridge person would write about their university. Sweetness and light?…

How can a countrywoman look sleek and elegant when heading by public transport to London for an overnight stay? The bald answer is that you can't – unless you also own a London flat where you can keep a second set of everything: make-up, clothes, books etcetera. You never see the likes of oldie queens such as Catherine Deneuve or Inès de La Fressange in bagwoman mode. They can glide seamlessly from la campagne to l'appartement without having to pack anything but phone and keys. Single-home-owners like me are destined to carry up to one stone of impedimenta for an overnight stay in the capital. So we are bound to look, well, bagwomany. Travelling light should be much easier these days. The iPhone dispenses with the need for wallet, address…

On holiday, catastrophising is normal. A traffic jam can happen anywhere in the world and it is a nightmare abroad, where time is more precious. One of the worst catastrophes during my recent trip to Tenerife was when I finally got the company assembled for my full English breakfast. As I tried to crack the first egg to fry over-easy, I let out a high-pitched woman's scream. The eggs my womenfolk had bought were pre-boiled. A nightmare. On the packet it had said ‘Cooked eggs’ – but in Spanish, of course. Horrid white golf balls in their shells. In desperate need of winter sun, I had been allowed by my elder daughter to join her holiday with two female friends on condition that I ‘stop being negative and overreacting to…

I've just been playing Debbie McGee to Chris van Tulleken's Paul Daniels. The TV doctor was giving the first of three Royal Institution Christmas children's lectures. I was one of his sidekicks, aiding and abetting his sometimes alarming, often funny, always fascinating expositions on the human gut. When the children emerged, they'd been riveted for two hours and were bubbling with excitement. The TV lecture lasts an hour, but filming took longer. No one was bored, tired or restless. They'd learnt all this: the workings of the mouth (via a minute camera, fed down Chris's doctor twin brother's gullet); how we manage not to choke while talking, eating, and drinking at the same time; how we can swallow when upside down; how the stomach massages food to pulp; how the…

There are few subjects more interesting, alarming and reassuring to the elderly than MAID – medical assistance in dying. This is the term preferred in medical journals to ‘medically assisted dying’, whose acronym would be MAD. Unfortunately, there are some ways of dying whose suffering cannot be fully alleviated by medical means. Indeed, they are so terrible that many decent people wonder whether it would not be kinder to help the sufferers die, or even to kill them. I can easily imagine circumstances in which I would rather be put down – to use a veterinary term – than continue. But, of course, anxieties remain about the improper resort to MAID, especially in a country such as Britain where administrative incompetence has become so common, and where we may expect…

I'm scared to death of being poor. It's like a fat girl who loses 500 pounds but is always fat inside. I grew up poor and will always feel poor inside. It's my pet paranoia. Cher As soon as you find you can do anything, do something you can't. Rudyard Kipling I spent my childhood clad in 1970s hand-me-downs, primarily from male cousins, which mainly consisted of a selection of beige, brown and orange dungarees. That, combined with a perfectly round pudding-bowl haircut, made me look, on a good day, like a cross between Ann Widdecombe, one of the Flower Pot Men and a monk. Miranda Hart Suicide is man's way of telling God, ‘You can't fire me – I quit.’ Bill Maher A woman is like a tea bag…

The Hohenzollerns and the Nazis: A History of Collaboration By Stephan Malinowski Allen Lane £40 This work is substantial in every sense of the word and one that historians will find most fascinating. It weighs in at 682 pages (though mercifully for the reviewer the last 200 pages are endnotes). It is a welcome contrast to the tabloid and sensational ‘history’ pushed out by so many authors these days. I came to the book with some enjoyable preconceptions, having been assured by German friends that the author, Stephan Malinowski, was a brilliant scholar. He was greatly admired by the late John Röhl, who spent decades stitching up the Kaiser, proving that everything about the Kaiser was horrible – he was a horrible little boy, a horrible son and so on…

The Madness of Courage: The Exceptional Achievements of Gilbert Insall By Tony Insall Biteback Publishing £25 Group Captain Gilbert Insall was the only man in the First World War to have both won a VC and escaped from a German prisoner of war (POW) camp. This account by his great nephew, an intelligence historian, is not the usual hagiography – understandable though that might have been – but is a serious contribution to the history of that war. It highlights not only the hair-raisingly primitive conditions of early aerial warfare but the much less well-known world of British and Empire POWs in Germany, of whom there were some 175,624. When Insall joined the newly formed Royal Flying Corps (RFC), the aircraft were unreliable and training inadequate – unsurprisingly, given that…

JEFFREY BERNARD IS UNWELL Coach & Horses, Soho, London Anyone with any taste who read the Spectator between 1978 and 1997 would turn first to Jeffrey Bernard's Low Life column, described by Jonathan Meades as ‘a suicide note in weekly instalments’. By rights, Bernard's column should have made miserable reading, coming from a part-time journalist and full-time alcoholic. His barstool dispatches from the Coach & Horses pub in Soho chronicled a lifetime of self-inflicted misfortune, including four failed marriages, a few legal mishaps and a string of sackings and missed deadlines – all brought on by what he called ‘the other woman’, aka the demon drink. So why was he so entertaining? Partly because, like all good journalists, he had an eye for a good story. Partly because he wrote…

AN OXFORD ELEGY ‘And that sweet city with her dreaming spires/She needs not June for beauty's heightening.’ The idea of Oxford as the city of dreaming spires (or aspiring dreamers, as I sometimes imagine it) is from Matthew Arnold's ‘Thyrsis’. It was the pastoral threnody for his friend the poet Arthur Hugh Clough, who died in Florence in 1861, aged 42. That Sweet City is the title of a new recording from Signum Classics which couples two rarely heard yet quietly memorable pieces of English music. Both were premièred at the annual summer concert of The Queen's College, Oxford, in the early 1950s. The 1951 concert introduced a cantata by Kenneth Leighton, then a 21-year-old composer reading Classics at the college. The texts of this thanksgiving to spring, Veris gratia,…

DINING WITH THE STARS What is the etiquette when it comes to sitting next to a famous person in a restaurant? It might be easier to start from the bottom up, ie how not to behave. My grandmother was always a good indicator. Once, while lunching at The Ivy in the '60s, she spotted Kenneth More at the next-door table with his much younger wife and boomed, ‘Isn't it a shame he's become impotent?’ London's most fashionable eatery fell silent. Before Christmas, my old friend Charles announced he was leaving the City to enlist in a Paris clown school. To celebrate this shrewd decision, we and our ladies had dinner at Ibai, almost next to his office. Ibai is one of two Basque grills I'm going to tell you about.…

NEW YEAR, NEW CAR? The new year was less than a day old when I was asked the question that's a seasonal fixture for anyone writing about what the Edwardians called motorism: if I were to buy a new car, what would it be? It depends on what you want a car for – high or low mileage, carting lots of stuff or people, towing, local shopping, Continental touring or just for pleasure? Not to mention the depth of your pocket, running costs and how long you'll want to keep it. And for those who imagine that what they drive makes any difference, its effect on the environment. To complicate matters, there's also a list of things I don't want a car to do. I don't want it to be…

Following the success of our two previous tours of Rajasthan, we are returning with the best possible guide in the shape of young Sam Dalrymple (pictured) who grew up in India with his parents, historian William Dalrymple and artist Olivia Dalrymple. Fluent in Hindi, he is an author and columnist for Architectural Digest. Sam has plotted his dream itinerary to end in Jaipur for the annual literary festival chaired by his father. He will guide us through his favourite parts of Delhi, Jodhpur, Nagaur and Jaipur. We will be staying at wonderful, hand-picked hotels, and local travel agency Banyan will be running the transport and all the practical aspects of the tour. There is also the opportunity to extend your ten-day tour. ITINERARY For a more detailed itinerary and the…

Madeline Smith (p17) was a Bond Girl in Live and Let Die, where Roger Moore undid her dress with a digital watch. She was in The Persuaders and Alan Bennett's Habeas Corpus with Alec Guinness. Don McCullin (p18) is Britain's greatest war photographer. He has covered conflicts in Biafra, Cyprus, Vietnam, Cambodia, Israel, Jordan and Northern Ireland. His new book is The Roman Conceit. Mary Kenny (p35 and p53) has been writing for The Oldie since the first issue in 1992. Born in Dublin, she wrote a biography of Lord Haw-Haw and is author of Goodbye to Catholic Ireland. Chris Jagger (p74) is a musician. His new album is Mixing Up the Medicine. He contributed to two Rolling Stones albums and made clothes for Jimi Hendrix. His memoir, Talking to Myself, is…

It is at this point in the calendar, with the tax-payment deadline newly expired, that casualties of efforts to contact His Majesty's Revenue & Customs by phone hit their peak. The observant will identify these pitiable creatures by the deadened expression of the shell-shocked wandering away from the Somme. In my case, a glance in the mirror will suffice. Last year, according to information purloined from the Government by a public-spirited hacker, the British spent an aggregated 719 years on hold for HMRC. My personal contribution to that tally cannot be quantified without minimal research of the kind that is such anathema to this column. But it must have been a couple of days idled away listening to recorded music composed by a mad person with the sole intent to…

When I was 19, I was sent from the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya to Cyprus, to complete the last six months of my National Service in the RAF. I went to Episkopi, a small place outside the town of Limassol. My new home – a few tented lines, a dozen yards from the Temple of Apollo – overlooked the Mediterranean Sea. Little did I know that some 50 years later, the classical world would totally consume me. I have spent the better part of my life covering conflict, war and tragedy. I often ask myself whether I am really breaking new ground, or am simply repeating the same subject matter – broken bodies and minds, in marble, instead of flesh and blood. It can feel as if I am…

As a 78-year-old President Trump takes over from an 82-year-old President Biden, geriatric leadership still characterises American politics. On the right, there's 91-year-old Senator Chuck Grassley; on the left, 86-year-old firebrand congresswoman Maxine Waters. Kay Granger, an 81-year-old US Representative from Texas, who was missing from her office during much of 2024, was eventually found living in a retirement home that specialises in memory care. America's treatment of her elderly, and the nation's healthcare system in general, again came under the spotlight when the CEO of the giant UnitedHealthcare, Brian Thompson, was gunned down in broad daylight in front of his New York hotel by Luigi Mangione, 26. The crime was seemingly an act of revenge for some past grievance. Shell casings found at the scene of Thompson's murder had…

The electoral constituency of Dover and Deal comprises two English coastal towns, just eight miles apart. And it's rather sad to observe the contrast between the two. Deal is repeatedly named as being among the ‘50 best places to live’. The Financial Times has dubbed it Hoxton-on-Sea, an allusion to its fashionable hipster status. Meanwhile, poor old Dover has drifted well down the popularity charts. One of the most famous, most historic ports in the world, Dover was recently named Shitville by a report in the New Statesman. Deal is packed with affluent people giving smart parties in gorgeous homes – far above my status, as I am just the eccentric local scribe. And Dover is among the most deprived places in England: it is number 94 on the list…

Judgeitis is not a disease to be found in any medical dictionary. Nonetheless, it definitely exists in the legal profession. It is an unattractive mixture of pomposity and self-esteem. It is arrogance, or pride. The dress code for barristers appearing in any court above a magistrates’ court, specifies, among other things, a white shirt. When a person has put on a winged collar, bands, a jacket and a gown, only a fraction of the shirt is visible. I was once in court when a young barrister was wearing a pink shirt. The judge looked aghast, and said, very slowly and ponderously, ‘I will hear you, Mr Smith. I will hear you. But I cannot see you.’ He had taken this minor infringement of the dress code as a personal insult…

Dr Jim Swire on Lockerbie SIR: Frances Wilson's positive review of the TV drama Lockerbie: A Search for Truth (February issue) majors on the campaign by me as spokesman for a small group called UK Families-Flight 103 over the past 36 years. May I encourage all your readers to view this series of five episodes. However, after 36 years, there are not many of us members of UK Families-Flight 103 left now. The current TV series reviewed in The Oldie is decorated by Colin Firth and Catherine McCormack, among others, whose skills are amazing and who warmed us by becoming visibly moved by the tragedy as filming progressed. Our campaign is, and always has been, about our rights as close relatives of some of the victims, to know why the…

Social lies Few things are more annoying than listening to your partner tell a tale you know is riddled with inaccuracies. You know it is because you were present when whatever it was actually happened and you have 20/20 recall. To hear the details being butchered over the dinner table is a kind of slow torture. The older I get – and the more times I've heard the story, in all its incarnations – the lower my threshold for social lying becomes. We all exaggerate sometimes, but when the whole account is a rococo embellishment, something gets lost. I think it's called the truth. Never let the facts get in the way of a good story? Oh, please do. The problem for the listener is that if you correct your…

‘Hands Touchin’ hands Reachin’ out Touching me, touchin’ you’ Sweet Caroline, Neil Diamond At the beginning of the 21st century, my stars must have been twinkling in some delightful arrangement that celebrated the name Caroline. I've spent an extraordinary and extraordinarily happy time dealing with two fascinating Carolines. Lady Caroline Lamb (1785-1828) and Caroline Norton (1808-77) had one tremendous connection through William Lamb, Lord Melbourne – Whig Prime Minister in 1834 and 1835-41. Lady Caroline Lamb was married to him at 19. William succeeded his father to the Melbourne title only after her death – so she never bore the Melbourne name. Caroline Norton was accused of adultery with Lord Melbourne, by her husband George Norton. In a famous trial, George Norton sued Melbourne for criminal conversation – or adultery.…

I recently rediscovered The Public Ear – a bold new arts show, broadcast on the Light Programme from 1963 to 1964. Joan Bakewell confirmed how exciting it was in 1963 – pre-JFK's murder, anyway. We heard a young listener, thrilled to have heard George Harrison's voice, imploring the BBC to send her a tape recording. Sorry, no. Then Pete Atkin, producer of Martin Jarvis's Just William, wrote to us to say he'd proposed, long ago, a ‘BBC Radio Club’: members would receive a list of programmes available on cassette. In 1995, The Oldie seized on this idea. Our founder, Richard Ingrams, believed readers ‘valued the enjoyment they got from listening more highly than that they got from viewing’. The Oldie would soon be offering a tape service for listeners wanting…

POP STAR'S GUIDE TO PR Today, as I write this, Taylor Swift has 283 million followers on Instagram. Should she want publicity, one of her minions has merely to tap out a post and 283 million interested parties will be all the wiser. She worked her way up in the age of the internet, playing shows, making records and tweeting about it to an ever-expanding fan base. One forgets how hard it was before social media to get attention. And how those with the greatest thirst for it were the most inventive. I direct you to Michael Stipe of REM, whose first television appearance was as a teenager at a fancy-dress screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. His lust for the spotlight ensured that he came in full drag,…

PARSNIPS According to gardeners’ lore, parsnips should not be dug up until frost has got into the ground. In this part of southern England, that would have meant waiting this winter until January, and one cannot be without parsnips at Christmas. However, parsnips can continue to be dug until March, when it will be time to sow seed for the coming year. There are a few important points to be made when you're growing parsnips. The seed should be sown directly into the ground, but not if the soil is still cold or wet. Germination is slow and may take up to three weeks, and the young plants should be watered regularly. If the ground is stony and not deeply dug, the parsnips are – as I have learnt from…

HEAVY-DUTY WINE In October 2021, the then Chancellor Rishi Sunak boasted in his Budget speech that he was ‘taking advantage of leaving the EU to announce the most radical simplification of alcohol duties for over 140 years’. Really? Try telling that to the UK's 1,000 or so independent wine merchants. Since 1st February this year, they have had to grapple not just with a possible 200 or so different excise bands, based on 0.1-per-cent increments in ABV, but with the red tape and labour costs that this Byzantine new system entails. The wine trade's headaches over Brexit have turned into migraines. As Richard Davis of DBM Wines says, ‘This will substantially increase costs to wine merchants and inevitably increase prices for customers.’ British wine-drinkers are already saddled with higher taxes…

Sometimes, technophiles like me are forced to admit real life and the latest technology are not always aligned. The universe lurches into our digital existence and reminds us of who is really in charge, despite all our reboots and upgrades. I have a smartphone; if you read this column, you probably have one, too. Mine has a gadget that reads my fingerprint, and that's how I unlock it. It works well, except when I have wet hands, but that moment passes. It's a speedy and efficient way of opening my phone. My laptop has a similar security system. I assume they are both secure. So far, so good. Real life has a habit of throwing spanners into the works, upsetting the Californian nirvana we are supposed to experience with our…

Do you travel light? No, I travel very, very heavy. I simply cannot make up my mind as to what I might need. I've got two vast suitcases, whose contents I've disseminated around the apartment I'm staying in, and I've got the miserable task in a month of cramming it all in. Having acquired lots of things, I might buy a third suitcase… What's your favourite destination? I have dear friends in Mykonos. My husband, Sebastian, and I often stay with them. Earliest childhood holiday memories? My mother, until I was five, was a school secretary in a very eccentric school called Elmcroft College in Goring-on-Thames. So really one was on holiday all the time there, because there was the Thames, the fields, the orchards, the rivers… I'm not really…

IN COMPETITION No 315 you were invited to write a poem called The Delivery. ‘What became/ Of that bowler, immortalised in Larkin's Whitsun Weddings?’ wondered Adam Wattam: ‘His run-up never ended, thanks to Larkin's cinematic cut./ The delivery and the life that followed are therefore up to us.’ The cricketing poems surprised me by their excellence. Most others were obstetric or doorstep, some both. ‘The modern convenience of on-line transactions is easy and fast for sure,’ wrote Fay Dickinson, ‘But it can't match the human interactions of delivery to your door.’ Robert Best told a joke three times till he got the delivery right. Commiserations to them and to Polly Sharpe, Ann Hilton, Julie Wigley, David Dixon, Peter Hollindale, Andrew Lacey, Basil Ransome-Davies, Marie Maher, Sue May, Michael Keegan, Philip…

Stop chasing lost emu, say police in Lincolnshire Guardian Village Post Office to move across the road Chew Valley Gazette Man who crashed Nottingham couple's wedding fined a few pounds Nottingham Post £15 for published contributions SIGN UP! SIGN UP! for the FREE Oldie newsletter Every Friday, we will send you the very latest stories and features – the more timely stuff which doesn't make it into the magazine. And a joke from the late great Barry Cryer. Plus you get advance notice of our literary lunches, reader trips and courses. Don't miss out. Go to www.theoldie.co.uk and enter your email address in this box: Sign up to our weekly e-newsletter…

WHAT WAS the police bell? The bell on a police car was also known as the ‘gong’. The gong's origins date from 1921, when Winkworth Engineering, near Basingstoke, received an order for their first emergency warning system. Winkworth Electric Car Bells Ltd provided equipment for police forces, fire brigades, ambulance services and other government bodies. When Ealing Studios shot The Blue Lamp in 1949, the sole musical accompaniment for the opening credits was from the frantically ringing gong on the Humber Super Snipe. During the following decade, no B-feature seemed complete without a Wolseley 6/80 pursuing overacting villains through Croydon. The Roadcraft manual for police drivers gave stern advice about correctly using the gong. In 1964, one motoring journalist noted, ‘Traditionally in this country, bells are used for warning traffic…

Like every addict, I can remember the first time. I was about eight or nine and had been sent to play with an older boy I didn't know, Kenneth. This was the mid-1970s – though on the Scottish farm where we were staying, which belonged to cousins of ours, and where Kenneth's father worked, it was still the mid-1940s. Even at my age, and awkward and bookish, I could sense I had little in common with Kenneth. But he knew there was one thing every boy was interested in. ‘Hey,’ he said, handing me a magazine with a luridly illustrated cover, ‘have you seen this?’ Commando comic books reared my generation of boys. We were living even then in the shadow of the Second World War. Our expert knowledge stemmed…

I have inherited from my dear father, Auberon Waugh, a very acute sense of smell. It is one of those attributes that, although not often very useful, can bring a great deal of joy to life. It can also, on occasion, be very disconcerting. The smell of a sneeze in a car drives me to distraction. My passengers understand that, even if they themselves cannot smell anything, all windows have to be left open for a few freezing minutes to mitigate the olfactory effects. Please understand that this has nothing to do with germs, but everything to do with smell. By the same token, I hate the smell of thumb-suckers. Imagine my horror then, when my Child Catcher's twitching nose was suddenly assaulted mid-lesson by the smell of a thumb-sucker.…

I was recently gazing through the back window into our small outside space and started to wonder where all the birds had gone. The yard was empty. Now, as a small animal, I know winters can be tough. I have a lot of sympathy for other tiny creatures, especially the birds. Mrs Mouse reminded me we had an old bird-feeder hanging around. No food, no birds. So I went down to Greenford Timber for some peanuts (which, contrary to their reputation, are quite expensive). I filled up the bird-feeder and hung it on the washing line and waited. And, quite magically, after just a few minutes, a little, nervous, fluttering blue tit appeared on a rose branch. He eventually plucked up the courage to fly down to the feeder. He…

Monsignor Keith Barltrop was the celebrant at the requiem mass for Marigold Johnson – social reformer, Labour parliamentary candidate and widow of the writer Paul Johnson – at St Mary of the Angels, Bayswater. Marigold Johnson worked for Frank Field at the Child Poverty Action Group. She worked for the British Irish Association, aka ‘Toffs against Terrorism’, and was an NHS grief counsellor. Monsignor Barltrop said in his homily that Marigold's death was an ‘end of an era for intellectual and political life in this country’. He recalled Marigold approaching him ten years ago and asking him, in a stage whisper, to talk to Paul about death. There then followed an awkward conversation in the church where a cheery Paul showed no inclination to discuss such weighty matters. Her son…

Attention, architects, designers, visionaries! You have been invited to propose a monument to Elizabeth II, to be placed in St James's Park, in a spot chosen to ‘juxtapose the informality of a busy London park with The Mall's ceremonial route’. Those are the slightly deadening words of the late Queen's former private secretary and now Chair of the Memorial Committee, Lord Janvrin. I am glad to see that at least two of the memorial committee have historical credentials – Sir William Shawcross, the biographer, and Anna Keay, historian and curator. The latter's most recent book was a brilliant evocation of a kingless Britain, during the Interregnum (a description that assumes the country's natural condition includes a Rex – or Regina). But I don't think we should cast her as a…

GLADIATORS OF BRITAIN Dorset Museum, to 11th May HANS COPER: RESURFACE The Arc, Winchester, to 24th March It's a 12-minute walk from Dorchester Museum to neolithic Maumbury Rings, turned by the Romans into an amphitheatre. It isn't known if gladiators fought there (although Hardy implied it in The Mayor of Casterbridge). But, as well as Gladiator II, the amphitheatre is a good peg for this show, organised by the British and Colchester and Ipswich Museums. Many Roman artefacts have been excavated in Dorchester and are held in the museum, but one of the most evocative exhibits comes from Colchester. It is a 2nd century AD cremation vessel (pictured), with a fight between a secutor, armed with short sword and shield, and a retiarius with net and trident. A gladiator's helmet…

LENTEN FEAST Nothing fancy does you good. Forty days of the Lenten fast – time enough to clear out the store cupboard – start on Ash Wednesday, 5th March. Abstinence suits the time of year in the northern hemisphere, when fishing ports are closed by storms and fields lie fallow. Medieval monastics interpreted the rules of fast according to their order. Franciscans, famously abstemious, subsisted on bread and water. Benedictines (there's a reason for eggs Benedict) contented themselves with a leg of lamb which, if first dipped in well water, counted as fish. For the laity, necessity was the mother of invention. Lent was an opportunity to make the most of whatever was in the larder or overwintered in store, provided it was plain, wholesome and undemanding of the cook's…

NAUGHTY BUT NICE STAR I have a new sporting hero. This is despite the fact I have never actually seen her play. But I've seen her speak. At the Australian Open, the American tennis player Danielle Collins turned herself into something the sports world has long needed: she became a proper, original pantomime villain. And she did it with a really arch sense of humour. She was being booed to the rafters by a well-lubricated Melbourne crowd deep into one of the all-night sessions that tournament goes in for. Her crime was to be beating the local contender, Destanee Aiava. When she eventually triumphed, to a rousing cacophony of catcalls, her response was magnificent. In her post-match on-court interview, she thanked the crowd for their rudeness. ‘Every person that's bought…

Those of us oldies who have the temerity to survive beyond the age of 75 are still smarting at Rachel Reeves's anti-growth Budget. We may have escaped National Insurance charges on our ‘unearned’ income. But pulling our pension pot into inheritance tax (IHT) makes a nonsense of years of prudent planning for when we're gone. It makes saving for a pension a lot less attractive. Still, nil desperandum. There are ways to ease the pain. Not only did Labour spare Venture Capital Trusts (VCTs) but Ms Reeves has said she's in favour of them – a small comfort as we learn to deal with this spiteful administration. VCTs, among the most valuable innovations in the last 30 years for retail investors, manage nearly £13 billion. They invest in very small…

There are various Everests a British walker can scale. I mean not actual high summits, but peak experiences. What can beat an English bluebell wood at April's end? A dawn chorus expedition in May? Or a golden-leaved fungi foray in October? For rarity, in the southern half of 21st-century Britain at least, there is a walking experience that surpasses them all: a snowy stroll in brilliant sunshine when our ordinary world stands transformed. I've just returned from a snowbound Peak District where I reached that pinnacle. What an outing! There were inches of snow – frosted hard and then touched up with fresh powder – when we set out from the village of Litton. Like the best of walks, this offered a fine old pub, the Red Lion, for the…

Sex-mad husband Q My husband often wants sex when I'm not in the mood – and it annoys me. It's so selfish! When we do make love, and it's mutual, it's wonderful, but I don't see why I should submit to his every request. Name and address supplied A Frankly, I think you're the one being a bit selfish here. Aren't there times when you want sex and he doesn't, and he just makes the effort for your sake? Isn't that a sign of love in itself? Contrary to old-fashioned beliefs, men aren't always ‘up for’ sex. Now and again, they can find it just as much of a chore as us, but they make the effort because they love us. There's a growing view that men are selfish bullying…