Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2024 i Saga Magazine

Our September picks…

THE DICTIONARY When the mother of all dictionaries, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) was first proposed in 1857, the founders wanted it to include every word in the English language. Not only that but they decided it would trace the history, and give the biography, of each word from its very first appearance in a written source to the current day, and provide examples of how it should be used in context. The founders of the dictionary – a small group of men in Oxford and London – realised they could not do such a mammoth task alone, so they invited people around the world to help by sending in quotations from books they were reading, on small 4 x 6-inch ‘slips’ of paper, each focusing on a specific word.…

I recall a conversation with a mother who, like me, had an autistic and learning-disabled teenage son. We were comparing notes about where our sons might live in adulthood, and the support they would need. She said, ‘I want to make plans for everything until we both die.’ And then she added quickly, ‘Him first, of course’. Of course? Most parents assume that their children will outlive them. Yet in the case of disability – and learning disability in particular – this assumption is often turned on its head. In theory, her son’s life expectancy was no shorter than that of a more ‘typical’ person. Yet she wanted to outlive him, not for her sake but for his. It was because she loved him so much and was terrified about…

MOTORING Ask the dapper 11th Duke of Richmond to name his all-time favourite car and one of motorsport’s most affable characters suddenly plays coy. The brains behind the Goodwood Revival has been the proud owner of cars that include a Lancia Aurelia, a Rolls-Royce Ghost and a Porsche 911 GT2, and keeps an enviable collection of vehicles at his country pile in West Sussex – which makes the decision to go green at this year’s event even more surprising. The Duke – Charles Gordon Lennox, 69 – whose family have owned the 12,000-acre Goodwood estate for more than 300 years, has announced that this month’s Revival, a threeday drive down memory lane in period garb, will be the world’s first historic race meeting that is powered exclusively with sustainable fuel.…

home & style GARDENS / RECIPES / WINE / BEAUTY / GOING GREY / IT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO… The taste of a humble, homegrown spud has the power to change lives – just ask Mark Diacono. The award-winning food writer was no gardener at the time, but he planted potatoes simply to keep up with his gardening wife. After one bite of his freshly harvested early potatoes, however, he was converted. ‘They were nutty, buttery… absolutely delicious. I’d never tasted anything like it,’ he recalls. ‘I learned in that moment that there are some flavours you get only when you grow your own food.’ Following that revelation, he left work as an environmental consultant to set up his own smallholding, focused on flavour, and to join Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall at…

HAIR Grey hair is having a bit of a moment. A-listers such as Helen Mirren, Jane Fonda, Andie MacDowell and Sharon Stone have all proudly embraced it. Even Debbie Harry is shunning the style that gave her the moniker Blondie, instead choosing to show off her silver locks. Across the country, shades of grey are being enthusiastically adopted by increasing numbers of women. Suddenly, going grey is a fashion statement with a hint of rebel spirit about it. Even fashion bible Vogue is steadfastly behind the silver movement, dubbing model Kristen McMenamy’s grey hair ‘iconic’. The magazine, whose UK editor-at-large Sarah Harris has long, silverygrey hair herself, recently hailed going grey as an assertion of confidence and intent. This is a refreshing new take on a look that has long…

One of the most important retail lessons I’ve learnt in life is that no good will ever come from entering a shop that’s too posh to display its prices. Allow me to share with you the cautionary tale of notebook-gate. I was once browsing in a smart stationery shop in New York and decided to treat myself to a cute little pink travel journal. After casually handing the sales assistant my card, I idly asked how much it was. ‘That’s 2,300, ma’am,’ she smiled. I felt my legs begin to buckle. ‘Two thousand three hundred dollars?’ I gasped trying to sound like someone wholly unfazed by a two grand notebook. ‘Tad more than I thought!’ I stuttered. ‘No problem,’ she insisted. ‘Our more affordable range starts at 1,000 dollars.’ Reader,…

Walking can be better than physiotherapy to prevent low back pain returning, according to new Australian research published in The Lancet, which followed 701 adults for up to three years. They’d recently recovered from back pain and were ‘prescribed’ either regular walks or six physio-led sessions. The walkers had fewer recurrences of pain and went longer without (208 days) compared to the physio group (112 days). It’s thought the secret is walking’s gentle oscillating movements and muscle strengthening.…

FINANCE Winter fuel cash cut The Chancellor Rachel Reeves (inset) announced she will not make Winter Fuel Payments to more than six million pensioner households. The £200 payment per household (£300 where one is over 80) will be made to only around 1.5 million in receipt of pension credit or some other means-tested benefits, including mixed-age couples. Those in care homes will now be excluded. She has also scrapped the £300 cost of living payment added in 2022/23 and 2023/24: a loss of £500 or £600 tax-free this winter for millions of households. The saving is around £4 billion a year. Passing on passbooks Customers of Britain’s biggest building society, Nationwide, will have to stop using passbooks by February. Around one in 50 customers still uses one to manage their…

PODCAST Feel Better, Live More with Dr Rangan Chatterjee Dr Rangan Chatterjee is the archetypal TV doctor: glowing with good health, urbane and possessed of a burning desire to make us all as healthy as he is. After regular appearances on BBC Breakfast, Chatterjee added podcasting to his medical repertoire with this series, Feel Better, Live More. It sits in the charts alongside other top-rated health podcasts such as the late great Michael Mosley’s Just One Thing. What separates Chatterjee from the wellbeing pack is his focus on the health of the mind and managing stress. If episodes with titles such as ‘Finding your purpose at any age’ sound appealing, this is for you. I prefer his bite-size podcasts to the longer interviews with medical experts. Two-hour podcasts are way…

our pick DEATH AT THE SIGN OF THE ROOK Kate Atkinson Burton Makepeace House is mouldering away in its deer park, like Downton Abbey on life support. They’ve sold a Rembrandt, a Titian – and now a Turner has gone missing, along with Lady Milton’s charming assistant. Can the family fortunes be revived by the opening of a hotel hosting murder weekends? Devoted fans of Atkinson’s endearing ex-cop and private sleuth Jackson Brodie and the plucky DC Reggie Chase will thrill to this droll whodunnit. (Who done what? Stole paintings? That’s the least of it! Even patricide is possible.) Join the hapless guests snowed in with a bunch of third-rate thespians and with a psychopath on the loose. What a scream! THE BLACK LOCH Peter May Another ex-cop, and an…

More puzzles! There are loads more puzzles on the Saga Magazine app. Download from your app store today! £250 prize PRIZE CROSSWORD ACROSS 1 Site of monastery founded by St Aidan in 635 (11) 8 Italian bread made with eggs and fruit (9) 9 19th-century composer of Hungarian Rhapsodies (5) 11 Fast food chain founded in Johannesburg (6) 12 A psalm-like song with biblical lyrics (8) 14 Late 1970s TV series set in Second World War Belgium (6,4) 17 Brand-name lager introduced in 1959 (4) 19 Huge multinational conglomerate based at Minato, Tokyo (4) 20 Round-headed stick used in Anglo-Zulu War of 1879 (10) 22 Subatomic particle discovered by JJ Thomson in 1897 (8) 24 Island borough of New York City (6) 27 Italian city which has Piazza del Campo as its main public place (5) 28 Steam steriliser for sanitising dental…

Thanks to the dictionary, I now know I’m a ‘whiffler’. This very old term essentially describes someone who blows this way and that and can never quite make up their mind – as in the old joke: ‘I used to be decisive, but now I’m not so sure’. My kind of whiffling thankfully applies to just one area of life, though it’s a big one: the weather, and what to wear for it. Every morning, I hesitantly look out of the window, glance at my weather app and stride confidently over to my wardrobe, only to stand there for ten minutes pondering precisely which outfit will cater for lurches from sunshine to rain, and from Baltic to Saharan. This vacant staring is akin to the one that occurs when you…

EDITOR’S LETTER I hope you have all been enjoying a lovely summer – thank goodness it got here in the end! Something else that has had endless build-up but has taken its time arriving is my 60th birthday this month or, as my 58-year-old husband smugly prefers to call it, the start of my seventh decade. It’s at times like this I feel doubly grateful to be working at Saga where age and experience are a cause for celebration rather than relegation to the scrap heap. My old Fleet Street stomping ground sometimes felt like a re-run of that 1970s science fiction film Logan’s Run, starring Jenny Agutter in a fetching tunic, where the entire population was killed off when they reached 30. To be fair, the newspaper world was…

30% off this Molton Brown gift set WHAT'S INSIDE How to order We’ve teamed up with TOYL to bring you this Molton Brown offer*. Order yours now… ONLINE visit toyl.co.uk/saga BY PHONE call 0333 009 3219 BY POST send a cheque or postal order made payable to The Alchemy Partnership LLP, along with the name and address for delivery and marked September Saga Beauty Box, to TOYL, Unit F, Tokar Industrial Park, Yapton Lane, Walberton, West Sussex BN18 0AS. Please allow up to seven days for delivery. *Order by 30 September – available while stocks last…

On 12 October 1974, fast-food chain McDonald’s opened its first UK restaurant, in Powis Street, Woolwich. At the grand launch, DJ and Crackerjack presenter Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart welcomed hordes of intrigued locals into this shiny new US import. With its counter service and takeaway menu, it was a far cry from the more genteel Wimpy and its table service. For the past 50 years, McDonald’s has served as a cultural barometer for changing customs and habits in the UK – yet its core offering of a Big Mac, fries and a milkshake remains the same. With more than 1,450 restaurants now in the UK (out of 36,000 worldwide), it has not only altered the face of all our high streets, but the way Britain does business too. Woolwich, in the…

MEMORIES I have always been surprised at how a simple journalistic proposition can produce unintended political theatre. For a great part of the 1980s I spent some time in the Middle East where political tension, open conflict, consistent danger and threats of all-out war were part of the daily diet. The root cause was, in general, the failure of the Israelis and the Palestinians to agree a permanent peace. The Israeli position on the issue was easily obtained. Less so was that of the Palestinians, whose dominant voice was that of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and its chairman, Yasser Arafat. We all tried to explore the views of the Palestinians on a possible Middle East solution and as a result we all quietly pursued Arafat. We could never fix…

It’s telling that neither my granny (born 1920) nor my mum (born 1943) chose to go grey. But aged 50, I did. Turning grey has become much more acceptable in recent years. It’s a sign that you are at ease with ageing. But we don’t want to give up and give in. We are doing it with expert help. Sarah Bower, my hair colourist, is a ‘grey blending’ specialist. She lets people go grey gradually and get used to it. As she explains, grey hair is actually a mix of white hair (that has lost its melanin and pigment) and the existing darker tone. What makes grey hair look drab is not the white hair but the mix of the two. ‘There is no way to replicate the white in…

After Chile’s 2010 earthquake, my friend Derek convinced the military he was a member of a BBC film crew and that they should fly him to a devastated remote region. Part humanitarian, part adventurer, part wine obsessive, he’d heard it was a place with wine-growing heritage, now largely forgotten – and he was convinced those ancient vines could help rebuild the community and economy. Years later, Derek took me to see those vines. Today, he uses the grapes to make Garage Wine Co The Soothsayer’s Ferment Cinsault 2019 (13.5%, £18.95, slurp.co.uk). It’s probably my favourite Chilean wine: a smoky red that’s great with grills. But in many ways not very… Chilean. Several things about Chile aren’t very ‘Chilean’. It’s a ‘New World’ winemaking country that’s been doing it since the…

From time to time, I invite myself round to my son or daughter’s home for bedtime stories. Not to read to them, obviously, but to my grandchildren. The other day it was a chance to be with my three-year-old grandson, Wilfred. ‘What are we going to read today?’ I asked. ‘Flynn,’ mumbled Wilfy. So, off we shuffled to his bedroom, whereupon he went to a large pile of books and dug out his chosen story – and my heart sank. The story of Flynn is part of the Thomas the Tank Engine canon. No disrespect to the Reverend W Awdry, but I had hoped my days with Thomas and his friends were well finished, not least after listening to Ringo Starr doing the voiceover in the VCR cassette (remember them?)…

going places NEW ZEALAND / VIENNA / BIOMETRICS / LETTER FROM AMERIC TRAVEL Twenty-five years ago, filming began on Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings franchise, putting the New Zealand landscape firmly in the spotlight. Steep-sided fiords framed by star-lit skies, spreading forests and rolling hills, plus some of the most dramatic beach-fringed shores on Earth: all have been showcased in his epic film adaptations of JRR Tolkien’s masterpiece. According to Tourism New Zealand, a third of tourists visit at least one of the 150-plus filming locations spread out across this South Pacific wonderland, perhaps hoping to spot a stray hobbit or a flash of Gandalf’s grey beard. This fascination with the landscape isn’t going to go away, given that The Hunt for Gollum is set to be released in…

WHAT’S ON / STAYING IN Joan (ITV1, ITVX) our pick Just as the old adage states that you’re never more than six feet away from a rat, on ITV you’re never more than an ad break from the latest true crime drama. Fortunately, ITV’s latest offering, based on London jewel thief Joan Hannington’s jaw-dropping 2002 memoir, is considerably more welcome than a rat popping round your U-bend. Sophie Turner (Game of Thrones) stars as Joan, a housewife and mother trapped in an abusive marriage to a violent criminal, Gary. But when Gary goes on the run, having got on the wrong side of some very bad people, Joan sees her opportunity to pursue a new life for herself and her six-year-old daughter. The story charts Joan’s extraordinary journey from small-town…

Each number in the grid represents a different letter. We’ve given you two letters to start you off, which show that 8=A and 10=T. Write these letters wherever their corresponding numbers appear in the grid and then begin to work out the identity of the other letters. All 26 letters of the alphabet will appear in the finished puzzle. FUTOSHIKI Fill the blank squares so that each row and column contains all the numbers 1-5. Use any given numbers and the symbols that tell you if the number in the square is larger (>) or smaller (<) than the number next to it. ADD A LETTER Rearrange the letters and add one to these words to make five-letter words that fit the clues. The added letters will spell a word.…

Matt Tebbutt Recipes, p64 TV chef Matt presents shows including BBC’s Saturday Kitchen and Channel 4’s Food Unwrapped. He owned a Monmouthshire inn for more than 13 years and his new book celebrates pub food. Dr Virginia Bovell OBE Caring, p36 Virginia is the mother of Danny, 30, who has autism and severe learning disabilities. A founder of TreeHouse school, she received a doctorate in 2015 for her work in autism and ethics. Omid Djalili The World According to…, p129 The Iranian-British actor and comedian, 58, has been performing stand-up for 30 years, securing multiple awards in the process. His next tour begins in October. Dr Sarah Ogilvie Word affairs, p24 Senior research fellow in linguistics, philology, and phonetics at University of Oxford, Sarah is a former editor of the…

VIEW POINT There’s no shame in admitting I was excited, as so many of us were who suffer from a little too much of what I call ‘plumptitude’, when I heard of a new wonder drug that would make losing weight easier than it’s ever been. I’ve been through the weight gain and loss cycle too many times. I know conventional diets will help you lose weight, but a body tricked into thinking you’re starving will shriek ‘No, no, no’, and your metabolism will insist you put on weight. You always end up fatter than you were when you began a starvation diet! I had no concerns about being accused of ‘cheating’ to get slimmer. More than ten years ago, at 24 stone, I’d taken the surgical route. A gastric…

Sir Ian McKellen appears via Zoom on my computer screen resembling a splendid elderly lion: with grey hair to his shoulders and a long, tangled beard. It’s a very striking look but the reasons for it are poignant. In June, Ian (he hates people using his title), 85, was playing John Falstaff in Player Kings, a condensed version of Shakespeare’s Henry IV Parts I and II in the West End, when he fell off the stage. ‘I’ve relived that fall I don’t know how many times. It was horrible,’ he says in his familiar, honeyed baritone that’s graced scores of hefty stage roles, as well as Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings and Magneto in the original X-Men trilogy. ‘It was in the battle scene. My foot got caught…

INTERVIEW ‘I just would fall in love with stories, and it didn’t matter. I wasn’t aiming for a blockbuster ever, really’ When you’re the most Oscar nominated actor of all time, having been put up for the coveted award 21 times, you might imagine that any new filming project can be approached with a degree of nonchalance. Yet this is not the case for Meryl Streep. Despite a decades-long career marked by stellar performances and three Oscar wins from those multiple nominations, she admits there are times when she still feels like an ingénue. ‘I feel like I’m starting afresh. I used to say to my husband the night before [filming], “I don’t know how to do this”,’ she reveals with a laugh. ‘And he’d say, “You always say that”.…

At first glance, you’d think today’s McDonald’s options would be far healthier now than they were in the past. Fruit bags, salads and bottled water are now available on the menu and there’s a calorie count listed for each option. It’s a core part of the brand that their burgers are 100% beef. But when we dig deeper, we might be in a worse position health-wise than we were when it first opened in the UK 50 years ago. The calorie, sugar and saturated fat contents of some of these meals are far beyond what would be recommended, with the Double Big Mac coming in at 740kcals, with 44g of fat. When ordering on touch screens, you are constantly offered extras, sides and sauces, encouraging you to eat more. Although…

Plant… bulbs for colour Spring bulbs are the easiest-ever flowers – just plant and they’ll grow! Best of all are those that naturalise, spreading from their original planting without input from you, such as daffodils, crocus, camassias and fritillarias (right). All benefit from a long growing time, so plant by late September, whether into borders or directly into grass, at a depth of three times the height of the bulb. Get the natural look by scattering bulbs by hand and planting them where they fall. Save… money on seeds As overnight temperatures drop, veg plants run out of steam and set seed – but don’t waste this second harvest. Saving seed gives you next year’s crop for free. Peas, beans, tomatoes and chillies are worth saving – but don’t bother…

Tomato, bread and basil soup Traditional recipes always seem to be the best. This soup was a means of using up leftover bread and making the most of the abundant tomatoes and fabulous local olive oil. Many European countries have an equivalent, and I first discovered something similar in Portugal. It’s best made with the ripest tomatoes and the stalest bread, and don’t scrimp on the quality of the olive oil. Serves 4-6 YOU WILL NEED • extra virgin olive oil • 2 tsp chopped fresh sage leaves • 4 garlic cloves, peeled and cut into slivers • 10 fresh tomatoes, skinned and chopped • 400g can plum tomatoes • 4 slices stale ciabatta or sourdough bread, 21/2cm thick • salt and pepper • 1 litre vegetable or chicken stock…

My big, blond golden retriever Digby was possibly the love of my life. He died five years ago but I still feel his loss. As a puppy he chose me when I went to pick from the litter and just fell asleep in my arms. He was a one-woman dog who would do anything for me. When I met my husband Richard, Digby sat between us on the sofa, watching Richard out of the corner of his eyes, while creating a perfect physical barrier between us. He came to tolerate and quite like Richard… eventually. Soon after Digby died, we got a golden retriever puppy, Bertie. Not long afterwards he ate a corn on the cob at a barbecue. It wasn’t discovered until the following year, and despite two operations…

HEALTH The sound of Dr Lucy Pollock’s husband, Giles Johnson, blasting out On Top of Old Smokey on his trumpet pierces the air as we speak – or try to. Giles, 61, took up the instrument in January and Dr Pollock says loyally: ‘He’s already making a much lovelier noise than the frankly windy efforts of the first few weeks.’ Last year, he rowed the Atlantic with his boating companion Matthew Ponsonby and – with a combined age of 117 – they managed to bag a world record. Clearly Giles, a psychotherapist, has read his wife’s new book, The Golden Rule: Lessons in living from a doctor of ageing, which advises us all to seize life with both hands as we age. While most of us won’t be rowing the…

Sitting astride the Danube, Vienna waltzes effortlessly from palace to park, gallery to grand boulevard, concert hall to coffee house without missing a beat. As temperatures and visitor numbers decrease in autumn, the city ramps up its cultural offering. Now is the season for performances of Mozart and Beethoven symphonies in gilded concert halls, gallery days cantering through Old Masters and Klimts, and new wine in vineyards on the city fringes. The events calendar dazzles with the Long Night of Museums (5 October), the Viennale Film Festival (17-29 October) and November’s month-long Wien Modern, a feast of classical and avant-garde music, while the Habsburg’s 600-year legacy is still felt keenly at institutions such as the baroque Spanish Riding School, where Lipizzaner stallions perform equine ballet (see the box for details…

To play an extraordinary woman, you need an extraordinary actor – so Oscar-winner Kate Winslet is the perfect fit for the new film Lee, about wartime photographer Lee Miller. A celebrated American Vogue model, Lee studied photography in Paris and moved to London, before making the brave decision to report from the frontline during the Second World War. Her powerful portraits of the atrocities made history. Lee centres on Kate as the older Lee Miller, chatting with an interviewer (Josh O’Connor), and looking back on her groundbreaking images and that incredible chapter in her life, which is shown in flashbacks. We learn that the emotional toll of witnessing the barbarity of war led to her suffering from PTSD in later life. ‘Lee was a woman who lived her life on…

TURNING 50 Gok Wan fashion expert Sol Campbell footballer, right Tim Henman tennis player, below right Jimmy Fallon comedian and TV presenter TURNING 60 Keanu Reeves actor, right Patrick Marber comedian, playwright and actor TURNING 70 Anne Diamond TV presenter, below centre Cherie Blair lawyer, right Helen Lederer comedian Mari Wilson singer Martin Sixsmith TV news reporter TURNING 80 Anne Robinson TV presenter and Saga columnist Dame Margaret Hodge politician Michael Douglas actor, right TURNING 90 Sophia Loren actor, right Brigitte Bardot actor, below left…

1 Which classic novel is narrated by a character who is called Jim Hawkins? 2 ‘Looks good, tastes good, and by golly it does you good!’ Which milk stout, first brewed in 1907 and still available, was advertised with that slogan for many years? 3 Richard Harris played Professor Dumbledore in the first two Harry Potter films before he died in 2002. Who replaced him for the rest of the series? 4 Jazz musician Wynton Marsalis plays which instrument? 5 Melissa Matheson, the screenwriter behind ET, was married to which Hollywood superstar from 1983 until they divorced in 2004? 6 Hungarian patent HU170062 was taken out in 1975 for a product that has since recorded sales of almost 460 million, more than a third of them between 1980 and 1982.…

Having been born in London and spent most of my life there, just under three years ago I moved to Ipswich. Why Ipswich? I was probably getting tired of simple journeys taking up half the day. I’d played Ipswich a few times and it suddenly dawned on me that Suffolk is one of the most beautiful counties in the UK. I’m sure that some locals are a little wary of all the Londoners turning up, but my experience was nothing but positive. I feel like I’ve been adopted as an honorary ‘man of Suffolk’. One thing that always makes people from Suffolk laugh is mention of the massive adult store opposite a service station on the A12. Where else can you fill up your car with petrol, grab a coffee…