Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2023 i The Oldie

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary With the wonderful Dame Judi Dench, at the beginning of March, I am hosting a charity matinee at the London Palladium. It’s to mark my 75th birthday and, more importantly, to raise £ 75,000 for Great Ormond Street Hospital, where my youngest grandson was successfully treated for cancer when he was just a baby. The show is going to be a celebration of some of my favourite people: Britain’s great theatrical dames. The first actor to be knighted was Sir Henry Irving in 1897. The first actress to be made a dame was Irving’s stage partner, Ellen Terry, in 1925. Since then, just 50 actresses have become dames (many more actors have been made knights). Happily, most of the living dames will be joining Judi and me…

WHAT IS manifestation? Manifestation is when you want something so much that you actually make it happen. Say, you want to be 20 per cent richer. Or to achieve a firmer bum. ‘Whatever you believe you can have, YOU CAN HAVE!’ insists the so-called Queen of Manifesting, Kelly Walker, who has manifested her way to a $20,000-a-month career as a life coach. ‘Trust the universe!’ counsels Roxie Nafousi, 27, the beautiful, successful, well-connected, independently wealthy author of Manifest: 7 Steps to Living Your Best Life. According to the strange circular logic of manifestation, she manifested her own bestselling status. Indeed, so manifest are the powers of manifestation - there are 27 billion videos with the #manifestation hashtag on TikTok - it may seem surprising that no one manifested this miraculous…

1. The luxury of time - to do what one wants for a change When I was married to Colin [Lord Glenconner, r926-2010], I was always on the go. Now I can plan my day and do what I want. 2. It's much better being old than being young I was shy when I was young. Being married to Colin, I wasn’t noticed. He was so flamboyant. I followed in his wake - and I followed in Princess Margaret’s wake, as her lady-in-waiting for 34 years. Working for her, I met lots of people and now I’m not intimidated by anyone. Other people might be intimidated by me. 3. My lovely children are wonderful to me My girls play cards at home in the evening with me and take me…

Letter from America After nearly two decades in America, I am running out of teabags. I am also running out of patience with Meghan and Harry’s incessant propaganda against Britain and its people. Americans, meanwhile, are running out of patience with one another. Their country will in 2026 celebrate 250 years of independence from the British. Like me, it is disintegrating with age. The teabags are Donald Trump’s fault, but I’ll get to that later. The Meghan-and-Harry part is my fault. My accent and prior convictions as a historian give the misleading impression that I, like all Brits, am deeply versed in the history of the Royal Family and may even know some of them personally. Whenever America’s royals do something for the cameras - and it’s not clear if…

Three hundred years ago, Britain’s greatest architect, Sir Christopher Wren, died at the age of 90, just as his finest work, St Paul’s Cathedral, was completed. Join Harry Mount, architectural historian and editor of The Oldie, for a walking tour of Wren’s London, from St Paul’s to his fabulous City Churches, built after the Great Fire of London. Includes lunch (and wine) in Middle Temple Hall, the best Elizabethan building in London. 11 am Meet Harry Mount outside the main western entrance of St Paul's Cathedral Ipm Two-course lunch in Middle Temple Hall Tickets are £135 (inc VAT) per person, including lunch with wine. Limited to 20 people. Guarantee a place with Katherine by emailing reservations@theoldie.co.uk or calling 01225 427311 (Monday-Friday)…

Postcards from the Edge Each time I take my monthly Aer Lingus flight between Gatwick and Dublin, I buy a carton of Silk Cut cigarettes for a dear family member who enjoys the odd few fags. As Ireland is in the EU and Britain is not, duty-free purchases are on sale - so the gaspers are cheaper. But when the next Labour government arrives - and there will very likely be one next year cigarettes will be en route to prohibition, with a view to a total ban within six years. Do I feel guilty buying these ciggies, complete with their graphic photographs of diseased organs and ghastly afflictions caused by smoking? No. I’m acquiring this tobacco product for someone mature enough to make her own decisions, who moderates her…

My family doctor of 65 years ago, Dr S, remains my beau ideal of a GP. He was like Jim Dale of Mrs Dale’s Diary (rather than Carry On actor Jim Dale, interviewed in this issue of The Oldie). He came to the house whenever he was called, always wore a dark suit and looked at you through gold-rimmed half-moon spectacles. Nothing could escape his notice: diagnostic X-rays emanated from his wise eyes. You knew that you were safe and that nothing could go wrong. Indeed, nothing did go wrong. Nowadays an appointment at a GP’s surgery is like the Victoria Cross - rarely conferred but much valued. One feels almost privileged to be seen by what in Nigerian English would be called a whole doctor. If Heraclitus were alive…

By Peter Ackroyd Reaktion Books £20 Peter Ackroyd has given us another sweep through history, roaring through the centuries. This time, we learn about the origins of spoken performance in England and how the art of ac ting has developed. He takes us from the sacred rituals and liturgical dramas of the 11 th century, through the miracle plays, morality plays and mystery plays up to the 1560s and the emergence of professional actors who are ‘well arranged and openly speaking’ with a proficiency in ‘cunning, voice and person’, reaching into the present day. The Englishness of this study is not examined deeply. There is mention in the prologue of the contrasting styles and approaches of English, American and European theatre. The primary distinction, Ackroyd says, is that English actors…

As someone who writes for the Daily Mail, I am constantly astonished by the number of people who believe that Mail Online is its digital incarnation. It’s not true, I insist, sometimes quoting the opinion vouchsafed some years ago by the Mail’s then editor, Paul Dacre, that Mail Online is ‘a totally separate entity that has its own publisher, its own readership, different content and a very different world view’. The Daily Mail doesn’t boast what has been nicknamed the ‘sidebar of shame’, with its fascination for showbiz figures, and its photos of scantily-clad ladies with ‘peachy bottoms’ and glimpses of‘side boob’. In comparison with Mail Online, the Daily Mail seems high-minded and almost prim, although there is admittedly some overlap in content. It's no good. People won't be persuaded.…

A reader named Michael W Caldon is, like me, driven to distraction by babyvoiced women talking in croaky voices about ‘bucks’ or ‘berks’, rather than books’. Our torment reached its apogee with Broadcasting House, when Paddy O’Connell celebra ted the boom independent bookshops currently enjoy. Tim O’Kelly, of One Tree Books in Petersfield, a community hub, recommended two books: 33 Meditations on Death: Notes from the Wrong End of Medicine by Dr David Jarrett and the novel Still Life by Sarah Winman. Paddy’s other guest was a Book-Tokker - ‘Hi!’ - who shares her reading finds on TikTok: ‘So, yeh, absolutely, I mean, definitely,’ she had been in a bookshop recently, and bought a book. Which one? ‘It was What Lies Beyond the Veil.’ ‘And what does lie beyond the…

Broccoli comes in different guises. There is the vegetable more correctly called calabrese, with a bunched green head and a tree-trunk-like stalk; purple- and white-sprouting broccoli; romanesco broccoli, with pointed pale-green heads; and what the Italians call broccolini or broccoletti and we know as tenderstem broccoli. They are all brassicas of the species oleracea, while broccoli rabe, known in Italy as cime di rapa, are turnip tops and not of the same family. Tenderstem broccoli was developed when calabrese was crossed with a variety of Chinese kale, and was introduced in Japan 30 years ago. It has become popular recently and often appears on restaurant menus. The British-grown tenderstem is available during summer and until November, and in midwinter it is imported, mainly from Spain and Kenya. If sown in…

As I recall, the wine list in Angelo’s Taverna at the western end of Agios Georgios beach on Corfu was brief: retsina, Demestica white, or Demestica red. That was 40 years ago - and I drank Henninger lager for a week. The Henninger brand has, sadly, gone to the great Bierkeller in the sky, but the Greek wine industry’s star is definitely in the ascendant, as I discovered at a recent tasting organised by Greek wine specialists Maltby&Greek. More than 100 wines from 25 wineries were on show, with styles ranging from bone-dry Assyrtiko to ambrosial sweet Muscat, via strawberryscented Xinomavro and sparkling Vidiano, According to Maltby&Greek’s co-founder Stef Kokotos, Greece’s great strength - a multitude of ancient, indigenous grape varieties, each with its own personality - is also perhaps…

Every year, in January, there is a huge event in Las Vegas called CES - the Consumer Electronics Show. It is one of the largest tech-based trade shows aimed at you and me and it’s a place for all manufacturers to display their latest products, prototypes and dreams. Exhibitors include tiny companies and colossi such as Samsung and Microsoft. Its scale is astonishing: over 3,200 exhibitors spread across 50 acres of Las Vegas conference centres. The stuff displayed includes thousands of next-generation TVs, laptops, smart home gadgets and more. I have no desire to visit such a mammoth event (or to visit Las Vegas for any reason), but there is extensive coverage online and I watched a lot of it during our grim winter nights. CES is important, as far…

It is difficult to identify when a humdrum stroll beside the thirdmightiest river in London turned magical. It may have been on my finding a small forest of illicitly planted trees. It could have been when I stepped over a low wall onto a path through the nettles - a respectable walk turned into a trespass. But in truth, it was the moment I met my walking companion, Paul Powlesland, a dashing, Cambridgeeducated barrister and eco-agitator, guerrilla tree-planter, wild swimmer, half-man half-sprite in a retro jumpsuit. He leapt onto bridges and climbed trees as he showed me the sights, because placing one foot in front of the other as I’ve done most of my days isn’t really sucking the marrow out of life. We met at Town Quay in the…

I looked up the word ‘finesse’ in the dictionary: ‘impressive delicacy and skill’. It continues, ‘In bridge, an attempt to win a trick with a card that is not a certain winner, typically by playing it as the third card in the hope that any card that could beat it is in the second player’s hand.’ In the Cambridge Dictionary, there is another angle: ‘to deal with a situation or a person in a skilful and often slightly dishonest way’. To make this month’s 3NT on West’s four-of-diamonds opening lead, you need to show impressive delicacy and skill. No dishonesty is necessary. Dealer South North-South Vulnerable (1) Fourth Suit Forcing - ‘We’re goingto game; more information please.’ At the table, declarer beat East’s knave of diamonds with the king and…

My violent, ill husband QAfter 35 years of a marriage that really wasn’t that happy - he could be violent and both of us had affairs - we considered divorce, but eventually decided we couldn’t afford it. For another year or so, we didn’t speak much; just tolerated each other in the same house. Then, a year ago, he had a severe stroke. He’s in a care home and barely recognises me, and when he does, he becomes extremely pitiful and sentimental. But I feel so resentful. I have no pity for him, and resent visiting him at all. Is there any point? I know that if the positions were reversed, he wouldn’t dream of coming near me. The trouble is he has no one else to visit him as…

Aline Glenconner (p16) was a lady-inwaiting to Princess Margaret. She wrote the bestseller Lady in Waiting: My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown and Whatever Next? Jeremy Paxman (p17) joined the BBC in 1972. He presented Newsnight for 25 years until 2014. He has presented University Challenge (1994-2023) and Paxman: Putting Up with Parkinson’s (2022). Griff Rhys Jones (p20) starred in Not the Nine O’clock News and Alas Smith and Jones with Mel Smith. His BBC series A Pembrokeshire Farm covered the renovation of his holiday home. Hugo Vickers (p13 and P54) is our leading royal biographer. He has written biographies of the Queen Mother, the Duchess of Windsor, Queen Mary and Alice, Princess Andrew of Greece.…

Grumpy Oldie Man Identifying the precise moment when the country’s regression towards developing-world status started is beyond me - and possibly beyond those far cleverer than me (not, admittedly, the highest of bars). But I have the nagging sense that this downward trajectory, which barely perceptibly began aeons before Brexit and has accelerated into a corkscrew spin, started when motorists came to regard the deployment of indica tors as beneath their dignity. The theory will lack strong support from both the relatively sane and left-leaning historians. The latter would doubtless look elsewhere for the genesis of our national collapse. To that time some decades ago, for example, when the idea that the desires of shareholders morally outranks the needs of workers completed its journey from the crazier outreaches of the…

Mary Kittens Cosmetic Tips I am often mesmerised by the garishly coloured, two-inch-long nail extensions worn by women who have to use keyboards and generally handle things. How and why do they do it? The fashion was largely inspired by the TV show Keeping Up with the Kardashians, but of course the flawlessly groomed members of that family have ‘people’ to do their chores for them. Kardashian influencees do, however, have to get on with the normal jobs that hands perform - so they have trained themselves to use the pads, rather than the tips, of their fingers. ‘It’s just like learning how to walk in a pair of new shoes,’ an airline check-in girl told me. ‘You soon adapt.’ When nail extensions break, you have to go back to…

John Gielgud never did voiceovers - despite his instrument being described by Alec Guinness as ‘a silver trumpet muffled in silk’. Now almost every thesp, knighted or not, is keen to race into Soho or, with the new upsurge in working from home, duck under a duvet and breathe heavily into a friendly microphone. As a young actor, I couldn’ t break into that world of extra dosh. I did Dickens, Shakespeare and Wodehouse on radio and television - but that was ‘proper acting’, not being ‘a gob on a stick’. Eventually, I found myself in a voice studio, recording a nature commentary. Not big advertising bucks but maybe a start as a reach-me-down Attenborough. As I was leaving, a lady stopped me: ‘Have you got a few minutes, Martin?…

Town Mouse It’s a fairly regular occurrence. Soon after I’ve left the house, whether walking or bicycling, my phone will ping and a text message wall arrive from Mrs Mouse containing some sort of command. Looking back over the texts from the last few months is a bit like reading a cryptic diary. You try to remember what on earth was going on at the time. Recent examples include this moving and poetic line: 'I have a craving for Baileys.’ I happily acceded to this instruction and stopped at the Tesco Metro on Uxbridge Road to fulfil it. There was also this more frugal request: ‘When you come home, would you bring me a bit of bread?’ Another text, if seen by a passing spy, might indicate that we mice…

Pray for a short sermon SIR: Ysenda Maxtone Graham’s lovely article (January issue) about the merits of short sermons put me in mind of my excellent vicar when I lived in Lancashire. I once said to him that he never preached a boring sermon and asked how he managed to achieve this. His response was that he worked by the following drill: ‘I stand up, I tell ’em what I’m going to tell ’em, I tell ’em and then I sit down. Five minutes max.’ It is a formula I have often wished his fellow clergy would follow. Yours faithfully, Jane Moth, Stone, Staffordshire The fall of man SIR: A conundrum for my fellow pedants. I see that, in the serious part of his amusing column in the January issue,…

By Blake Morrison Borough Press £16.99 Blake Morrison may think he has written a memoir about his dead sisters but he has, unconsciously, written a book about himself. Who are they? There is his younger sister, Gill, ‘the plump pink infant with golden curls the ballet dancer, pony girl blazered schoolkid, Bee Gees fan’, who became an alcoholic and later went blind. There is Josie, his younger half-sister, the child of his doctor father (the subject of Morrison’s And When Did You Last See Your Father?) and his mistress Beaty, who was brought up near her siblings in Yorkshire, though the matter was not spoken of. ‘We knew he loved us,’ says Morrison of his father, ‘but his love allowed no room.’ I think Gill, the reluctant subject of a…

Censorship obliged creators to find a way to show, without showing, thus giving the viewers liberal range for their imaginations. Janet Leigh on the shower scene in Pyscho Happiness is a useless subject for a writer. Especially in English. Why do you think that is? English seems particularly suited to irony and sarcasm, to suggesting the emptiness of human hope and the futility of human illusions. Frederic Raphael, The Glittering Prizes It is always a pleasure to see other people desperately coveting expensive items that one has not the faintest inclination to own oneself - new model cars, designer clothes, up-to-date holidays, costly lotions and so forth. David Sexton Any piece of human behaviour will seem absurd if described precisely enough. Anthony Poiuell If you were a farmer, your farm…

One of the joys of sport for us spectators is watching a participant refusing to yield. Andy Murray battling through the early hours in Melbourne. Michael Smith and Michael van Gerwen exchanging 18os in the World Darts final. The time the now sadly departed Jim Redmond stepped on to the Barcelona track to help his stricken son Derek hobble and stagger across the finish line in the 1992 Olympic Games 400-metre race. These are moments that are central to our understanding of what sport is all about, those involved doing whatever is required to make it to the last. Nobody, we believe, sets out to lose. Unless, that is, they are playing snooker. The revelation that the 2021 Masters champion Zhao Xintong and nine other leading Chinese players are being…

Borth man drove without seatbelt Cambrian News Milestone reached in construction of toilet block Eastern Daily Press Traffic delays in King’s Lynn as Jaguar blocks the South Gate Lynn News £15 for published contributions NEXT ISSUE The April issue is on sale on 8th March 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 Annual2023 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 a crocodile? A line of schoolchildren walking in pairs, shepherded by a couple of teachers front and aft, was once a familiar sight. Temporarily released from desks to wend their way to a swimming baths, church or educational venue, they’d be chatting along like a flock of chaffinches. And the public, even when shunted by the line off the pavement into the gutter, would adopt an expression of benign tolerance. We used to call this set-up a crocodile. I presume the strange nickname came about because of the column’s wavy, sideto-side forward motion, combined with the head-up, shoulders-back posture usually adopted by the leading pair. The term was only ever used in Britain: ‘Crocodile: a girls’ school walking two and two in a long file, 1870’. (Shorter Oxford…

Who can forget the scene in Carry On Again Doctor (1969), when Jim Dale’s saucily named character Dr Nookey crashes through a window on a hospital trolley after taking a boneshaking descent down a flight of stairs? It was the actor, comedian and singer’s finest Carry On moment. But he actually made his Carry On debut six years earlier, in Carry On Cabby (1963). To mark the 6oth anniversary of his Carry On debut, Dale, 87, the last surviving big-name Carry On star, has taken a trip down memory lane with The Oldie - in his first British print interview for more than a decade - to discuss his extraordinary' career. It takes in hit records, Broadway shows and a string of Harry Potter audiobooks, as well as the Carry…

What does Gyles Brandreth have in common with Elvis Presley and Marlene Dietrich? No, it’s not that they’re all iconic sex gods. They all had a huge crush on the same beauty, namely the late, great Joan Rhodes (1921-2010), known as the Strongest Woman in the World. In the October edition of The Oldie, Gyles revealed that Joan was a boyhood pin-up of his. And who can blame him? If you are a fan of music hall in the second half of the last century, you might have seen Joan and her remarkable feats of strength. They involved tearing bulky old telephone books in half or into quarters, bending steel bars in her teeth and picking up two adult men at a time. Add this staggering strength to her movie-star…

North by Northwest (1959) isn’t abou t what happens to Cary Grant. It’s about what happens to his suit. The suit has the adventures, a gorgeous New York suit threading its way through America. The usage of calling a guy a ‘suit’ if you don’t like him, consider him a flunky or a waste of space, applies I to Cary at the beginning of the film. This suit comes barrelling out of the elevator, yammering business trivialities at a mile a minute. The suit moves with its secretary into the hot evening sun where we can get a look at it: it’s a real beaut, perfectly tailored, beautifully falling, lightweight, dusty blue. It’s by far the best suit in the movie: the villains, James Mason and Martin Landau, wear funereal,…

W e do death superbly in Britain. Nothing demonstrates that more than our state occasions. The Queen’s funeral showed that military precision and attention to the tiniest detail were no enemies of grand emotion, giving us a reassuringly reliable public framework for our collective grief. On Remembrance Day, our connection to the veterans who fought so hard for our fragile democracy is resoldered by this well-rehearsed, structured display, soothingly devoid of surprise or change. Even a small funeral in a country church, with its ritual of pleasingly familiar hymns and eulogies, conducted by a respectful vicar, reminds us all who we are and where we have come from. Our long line of traditions was forged by ancestors who make us who we are. Funerals and memorials ultimately uplift us. Show me…

w hen is a library not a library? When it’s a disused phone box (or other roadside receptacle), with a few Maeve Binchy or Tom Clancy paperbacks thrown on the directory shelf, plus quite possibly Windows 95 For Dummies. I’m a librarian - so people think I should love it when people put any old books in any old crate and label it ‘Library’. They think I’m blaspheming against mighty Thoth, the Egyptian god of reading, when I tell them how I feel. I feel the way any worth-her-salt GP would feel if she spotted a rusty first-aid box by the side of the road, with ‘Hospital’ emblazoned all over it - while real hospitals were closing or becoming semi-open ‘community hospitals’ staffed by unqualified volunteers. It would feel like a…

Dame Carmen Callil’s recent funeral was, appropriately for the founder of feminist publisher Virago, a thoroughly feminist service. It was conducted by the Rev MarieElsa Bragg, with Carmen’s goddaughters among the coffin-bearers. Afterwards, my son - her godson - sent me an email. He’d listened to the eulogies, watched Carmen on video, and now he kicked himself that he hadn’t got to know her better. When Oliver was born in 1983, one godfather (publisher Duff Hart-Davis, who later taught him to shoot a rabbit) sent him a case of port. The other godfather, Sunday Telegraph and Oldie journalist Oliver Pritchett, sent shares in Kodak - a good joke, anticipating a spike in family snap-taking. 'I shall be,’ promised Carmen on a scrawly postcard, ‘the best godmother ever.’ And she might…

Country Mouse Wiltshire is a huge county, and the part of it that lies south of the notorious A303, with its famous bottlenecks, resembles Dorset. Suddenly, streetlights and UPVC windows become rarities and noble trees like Atlas cedar, Douglas fir and Wellingtonia dot the Elysian Fields. I have a thing about Dorset. I think it might suit me better than Wiltshire. HJ Massingham, the expert on England’s downland, claimed the Dorset Downs ‘give a warmer welcome than those of Wilts’ - maybe because they’re just that bit further from London. Our older friend Anne believes that you need to be at least too miles from London for a place to have its own atmosphere, without the blight of excess weekenders importing their own atmospheres. Recently driving through Dorset’s untamed and…

Sophia Waugh: School Days Just before I got married, my soon-to-bemother-in-law gave her son some advice. ‘Whatever you do, always be kind to her,’ she said. He reported this to me with tears of laughter. ‘Isn’t that the oddest thing you’ve ever heard?’ he asked. It wasn’t, really. It was rather wise and very touching. It was his laughter at the very idea that stayed with me. I was reminded of this on talking to the deputy head at a local school this week. I have some Ukrainians living with me and the older of the two children, a girl, had come to me with a problem. It transpired that at the secondary school there was a culture of bullying the Ukrainian children. The locals (for want of a better…

By Salman Rushdie Jonathan Cape £20 Aged nine, Pampa Kampana watches her mother, and all the women of the tiny province where she was born, build a huge bonfire and walk ‘unflinchingly’ into the flames. The reason is ostensibly a humiliating military defeat in a battle not significant enough to have a name. Afterwards, the young girl is possessed by the spirit of the goddess Pampa, the local name of Parvati, lover of Shiva. That is: Pampa’s words start coming out of her mouth; the child herself is detached from them, but she becomes a prophet and a miracleworker, and later a poet. This book purports to be the rediscovered manuscript of the 24,000 verses she wrote about the founding of the city of Bisnaga, towards the end of her…

Tom Linley was the musician and friend Mozart never forgot. ‘He was a true genius,’ Mozart told the Irish tenor Michael Kelly, as they sat at supper in Vienna in 1784. ‘Had he lived, he would have been one of the great ornaments of the musical world.’ Mozart wasn’t the only person to be grief-stricken at news of Tom’s death at the age of 22 - in a boating accident on the newly created lake at Grimsthorpe Castle, Lincolnshire, in 1778. The Linley family - composerimpresario Thomas Linley and his five inordinately talented children - were centre stage in English cultural life in the 1770s. They were close associates of everyone who was anyone. One such was David Garrick, whose Drury Lane theatre had passed to the Linleys in 1776.…

My father died on New Year’s Eve, aged 87. He deserves all the credit for my lifelong obsession with restaurants, because we ate out pretty much every night during my childhood. The only time I was told I was spoilt was when, aged four, I demanded ice cream, and wailed at the waitress, ‘And don’t you dare bring me a wafer.’ I have hated them ever since. It never occurred to my parents or me that we were spoilt, eating our way through the seventies at Hungry Horse, Borsch N Tears, Le Bistingo, Bistro Vino, Halepi or Bertorelli. Every night was theatre, especially if we went to Flanagans and sang along with the pianist. By the age of six, I was precociously menu-literate, flipping between boeuf bourguignon and duck à…

Over Christmas, I joined a club I never sought to join: the Ancient Order of Misfuellers. To qualify, you have to fill a diesel car with petrol or vice versa. This usually happens when people muddle the pump nozzles. My case was worse -I did it unthinkingly but deliberately. On Christmas Eve, I took the diesel Volvo out for some last-minute shopping. The day before, I had taken my wife’s petrol Polo and filled it with superiorgrade fuel. I was musing on the wisdom of this: superior grade costs more and the cheaper premium grade is perfectly adequate for almost all cars. People denigrate ‘supermarket fuel’ but that’s nonsense - all fuel has to meet the same minimum standards. The advantage of superior grade is its higher octane, allied with…

In her acceptance speech at the 2022 Oldie of the Year awards, Dame Jane Goodall said chimpanzees differ from humans by only just over one per cent. Her Kenyan mentor, Dr Louis Leakey, chose her to do the chimpanzee study because she had not been to university. So she had a mind uncluttered by the arrogant scientific assumption that animals are inferior to humans. She duly found animals - famously, chimpanzees - ‘more like us than we like to think’. Ethology is the scientific study of animal behaviour, often under natural conditions. One of its founding fathers was Sir Julian Huxley (1887-1975), who in spring 1912 spent a fortnight’s holiday with his brother Trevenen studying the courtship of great crested grebes (Podiceps cristatus) on the four Tring Reservoirs, Hertfordshire. The…

Did you always want to be on the stage? I always wanted to be the centre of attraction. Do you remember John Lennon at primary school? He was a good laugh. I got on well with him, but I was more sport-minded than him. I went to school just to play football and basketball and go to the local swimming baths, where I cracked my tooth and got the gap in my teeth. I saw my sister yesterday, whod lost a tooth, and I said, ‘Are you trying to look like me?’ Were there any entertainers in your family? Mother ivas a dancer, and Dad used to like to get up and give a song. What was the Palladium like in the ’60s? Sensational. Crosby, Hope, Sinatra, the Beatles, Tom…

IN COMPETITION No 289 you were invited to write a poem called The Hobby-Horse. I was surprised by how many of you took for a subject the folklore creature, often represented in mumming performances by a horse’s skull. The children’s stick-horse and the all-too-favourite topic figured less, though Sue Smalley wrote of an old man long infuriated by items in newspapers: ‘Deep inside him angry hooves still beat, / Their furious echo bursts forth in a tweet.’ Commiserations to her, Con Connell and Fiona Clark, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of the Chambers Dictionary going to Basil Ransome-Davies. The hobby-horse, the King Charles’ head, A fetish, a fixation: All monomanias bringing dread To every conversation. It may be golf or…