Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2023 i The Oldie

Gyles Brandreth's Diary This year marks the 200th anniversary of the Oxford Union, the debating society at Oxford University. I was successively Secretary, Librarian and President of the Union, when I was a student, back in the late 1960s. We were called ‘undergraduates' in those days. And all the colleges were single sex. And the gates to the colleges were closed at 11pm. If you wanted to get into your own or out of somebody else's, you had to climb over the college walls. It was a long time ago. I am going back to the Union this month to take part in a commemorative debate – speaking alongside Michael Heseltine (President in 1954), who's interviewed in this issue as he turns 90, and Michael Gove (President in 1988). Over…

what is a beg? A beg is a people-pleaser. It's defined in the Urban Dictionary as a ‘suck-up'. The word ‘beg' started being used by young people in about 2010. I first became aware of the term two years ago when I was accused of ‘begging it' by my 16-year-old daughter. I had laughed at a man's unfunny and oft-repeated joke, and she knew I was doing it because I was about to ask him a favour. For a young person, a classic example of a ‘beg' would be someone who ‘doublemessages'. A girl can initiate communication with a boy she likes by sending him a message. But if she sends a second message before the boy responds, that constitutes ‘begging it' in the extreme. Were I to use slang…

The mane of flowing blond hair might have gone – it's snowy white these days. In most other respects, the years have been kind to Michael Heseltine. He turns 90 on 21st March, but he's in pretty good shape physically and, marbles-wise, is still firing on all cylinders. His dashing good looks and actionman style led to his being dubbed Tarzan in his political heyday. These days, he is more likely to be found tending to the trees and shrubs in the gardens at his home at Thenford, Northamptonshire, than dashing around Parliament. But he's still a deeply political animal. What does he think of the trio of Prime Ministers who've occupied 10 Downing Street over the last year? ‘I have a good personal relationship with Boris – who succeeded…

Eighty years ago, a quirk of fate saw a 1943 pin-up photo of film star Betty Grable smiling coyly over her right shoulder become a Second World War icon. The picture went off to war in the survival kits of around one in 12 Allied servicemen. Grable (1916-73) was proud to be a pin-up girl. She saw pin-ups as an inspiration for those without a woman in their lives back home. Her own pin-up accentuated her famous legs, which had been insured for a million dollars as a publicity stunt. The self-effacing girl with the million-dollar legs believed they were the two reasons for her success in movies – not her singing and dancing talents. She always credited the success of her pin-up to Frank Powolny, head photographer at 20th…

Mary Killen's Cosmetic Tips I was clenched and exhausted – until I had a foot inspection I had been working very hard for months. Although the project had been completed, my bodyset (as opposed to mindset) was still in clenched and hypervigilant mode. I was staying near Tisbury, Wiltshire, with two beady friends, one 75, one 80. They advised me that, if she could fit me in, I should definitely see their marvellous local reflexologist. ‘But I haven't got anything in particular wrong with me.' ‘Oh yes you have,' they observed. ‘You haven't relaxed yet – even though you've finished your work.' Her treatment, they alleged, was keeping the two of them going. One of them is stuffed with drugs for his prostate condition; the other has chesty issues. Yet…

There's much about it I don't like. We take too long getting to Scotland. The Houston scenes are a shambles – Burt Lancaster's tycoon snoring in a board meeting; the unfunny appearances of the angermanagement psychotherapist; the business executives gesticulating in glass offices. I don't much warm to Peter Riegert's MacIntyre, whose lines are delivered with a hint of sarcasm – though he's surely preferable to the other original casting choices: Henry Winkler, Robin Williams and Michael Douglas, who'd have overpowered – obliterated – the film's charm. Nor am I enamoured of Denis Lawson's Gordon Urquhart. He is suave – almost smug and smarmy – giving his frame an odd, vain little twist each time he moves through doors and hatches, swishing into rooms as the community's hotelier, barman, accountant…

Town Mouse Ah, Soho! Scene of my youthful late nights and soon, I hope, the scene of my old-age daytime rambles as well. On retirement – not that old hacks ever retire; we think we retired many years ago – I will live in a tiny flat in Soho. The cottage in the country with roses round the door holds no appeal for me. I would like to be old and living in the heart of things, with a fedora, silvertopped cane, shiny brogues, no car and a long coat of wool and cashmere with a velvet collar. Any money I have left will be sitting in a bank account for easy retrieval by my children when I die. The flat will be simple, sparse and in a Georgian house…

As soon as I was old enough to hold the cards, my mother taught me to play poker. At the same time, she taught me to be a good loser: more useful than the cultivation of a deadpan expression. At 16, in 1963, I took part in my boarding school's debating society. I was selected to defend the abolition of the death penalty. Up till then, I had never given the subject much thought but, while preparing my speech with as much help as was available in the school library, I became convinced this punishment was totally wrong, and I have thought so ever since. I lost that debate by a high number of votes; I was furious and I let it show. It still strikes me as shocking that…

The Oldie, 23–31 Great Titchfield Street, London, W1W 7PA letters@theoldie.co.uk To sign up for our e-newsletter, go to www.theoldie.co.uk Cheer up, Paxo SIR: Having just read Jeremy Paxman's reasons to be gloomy (March issue), regarding the issue of his new driving licence, I would like to ask you please to let him know that my new licence, applied for online on the 7th, arrived by post this morning, the 10th. Nil desperandum, Jeremy. Regards, Rod Atkinson-Hill, Edith Weston, Rutland Get your kit on, Babs… SIR: I am deeply offended by the cover of the March issue, which features a seminude Barbara Windsor. Could you not have used instead the charming picture of the clothed Miss Windsor laughing delightedly with Jim Dale on page 14? I am not prudish (although was…

By Joseph Kessel Elliott & Thompson £20 When I told people that one of my first patients in prison was a man who had killed and dismembered three children and who now complained of a slight cough, they would ask how I could treat such a man. It was the same question, in essence, as lawyers are asked about their defence of those whom they suspect to be guilty of the awful crime of which they have been accused. But what of treating a man such as Heinrich Himmler, guilty not of individual crimes but of unprecedented mass murder as national policy? To treat him medically was the fate of Felix Kersten (1898-1960), an alternative practitioner and masseur trained in Eastern methods who was the only person who could relieve…

Book of the Month How bizarre the wedding of the Duke of Windsor and Wallis Simpson on 3rd June 1937 was. There were almost no guests. A renegade priest hosted the ceremony. The Royal Family boycotted it. And the man who hosted the lavish affair was a Nazi collaborator. He later asked for a Faustian deal with the Duke which would damn him for ever. One of the few guests who attended, the Duke's fixer Walter Monckton, later said, ‘It was a strange wedding for one who had been six months before King of England and Emperor of India and dominions beyond the seas.' After the abdication on 11th December 1936, the Duke and Wallis were unable to see each other for six months – otherwise her decree nisi would…

My eldest child went off to university in 2020 and was immediately locked down in his campus flat. That year, he caught COVID twice and never met a single tutor. Now, as he writes his last essays, his tutors are abandoning him to strike. His university experience has been overshadowed by worry, weakly supervised effort, debt and doubts about the whole thing's benefits. How far from the golden postwar period, which ended in the mid-1990s. Then, university was the one carefree period of your life. You left home, free of parental supervision and, thanks to government support, free of serious money worries. That golden period ran in parallel with increasing social liberalisation. Universities were the Petri dish of the permissive society: three glorious years given up to intellectual, social and sexual experimentation. A…

Radio is our university of the Third Age. I treat some programmes like undergraduate essay crises. It's Donne next week, but first I must read Stevie Smith's Novel on Yellow Paper, before Melvyn's In Our Time, whose subject is Stevie on Thursday at nine. So I seize my Virago edition of Stevie Smith, guiltily unopened since 1980. I discover its introduction is by my old friend Janet Watts (we met on the Londoner's Diary in 1968) to guide me through the idiosyncratic quirks of Smith's prose: ‘the talking voice whose humour and warmth do not veil its merciless clarity'. As brilliant Janet notes, ‘Smith defied suburbia and its tennis clubs; braved spinsterhood and old maidhood; foreswore marriage.' Her novel reflects the Not Waving but Drowning poet's voice. On reading minor…

So far, this year has been a boulevard of broken dreams. There are, as Eric Clapton would wail, all too many tears in heaven. Jeff Beck and David Crosby gone within a fortnight of each other, followed by Barrett Strong, probably the best songwriter you'd never heard of. I hadn't either, till it was announced on the midnight news that the Motown hitmaker who wrote Money, I Heard It Through the Grapevine and Papa Was a Rolling Stone was now jamming with Beck, Crosby, David Bowie and John Lennon etc etc at the ‘late great' gig in the sky. I hope when he knocked on heaven's door, Barrett got extra St Peter brownie points for writing his biggest hits for others, as Prince did for Sinéad O'Connor (Nothing Compares 2 U).…

Unsurprisingly, the swede came from Sweden, where it was developed in the 17th century and known as Swedish turnip. Making its way south, the root vegetable found favour with the Scots, who dropped the link with Scandinavia and referred to turnips or neeps, which became an important accompaniment to haggis. Elsewhere in Britain, and particularly in Cornwall, swedes are called turnips and are an essential ingredient of a pasty. Since swedes take up to six months to mature, it is best to sow the seed in April, initially in trays or pots, or if outside no later than May. When thinned or planted out, the infant swedes should be about nine inches apart. Keep the plants well watered and free of weeds during summer, and lift them from October when…

As I sipped a glass of Valdespino's aptly named Deliciosa manzanilla, I gazed out at the fishing-boat-bobbing Atlantic ocean from a little beach bar in Sanlúcar de Barrameda. Reluctantly opening my eyes, I was in wintry Soho, but happily ensconced in the Academy Club on Lexington Street, whose owner, my old friend Andrew Edmunds, died last September, as Tom Hodgkinson writes on page 38. Andrew's wine lists, both in the club and at his eponymous restaurant downstairs, were the most benignly priced in London, and they still are: my half-bottle of Deliciosa was a mere £15. It retails for around £9 – sherry is the best-value great wine in the world, as Andrew knew very well. I wished only that he had still been around to chew the fat with…

Our dependence on the internet grows and grows, sometimes faster than we notice. I was idly looking at the possibility of buying a new television. I was startled to see how easy it is to buy sets that have no capacity whatever to be attached to an aerial on the roof. The manufacturers assume that we'll find all our viewing online; it's becoming normal. That's why I believe that broadband should probably be treated as a utility, and its supply and establishment properly regulated, just as with water and electricity. The government has – credit where it's due – made some useful steps in this direction, especially in terms of allowing internet suppliers access to Openreach's network at a fair price. It has accelerated competition and reduced prices. Another tiny…

You're 90 on 19th April. What was the most memorable game you umpired? My last Test match at Lords against India in 1996. England and India lined up in front of the pavilion to give me a fanfare of trumpets as I walked out. Is there anything you can't leave home without? My medication. When I was umpiring, I'd need my wristwatch. Do you travel light? I used to have all my cricket gear – my whites, my white shoes, my spikes I wore in my shoes. What's your favourite destination? New Zealand. But I enjoyed India, Pakistan, Australia, Sri Lanka and the West Indies. What are your earliest childhood holiday memories? Going to Scarborough and playing on the beach with my father at cricket. Did you prefer football or…

Spring is upon us, an appropriate moment to reminisce on last year's Spring Foursomes, in which my team lost in the Final to Hinden. I would never say I'm happy to lose. However, one member of the Hinden team was ill and we were all aware it might be his final chance to win. We were happy to shake their hands at the end – then jump into our cars, as we were all longing to leave the underwhelming motorway-junction hotel venue in Warwickshire. One member of my team was the legendary Zia Mahmood - always an exciting teammate both at and away from the table. Here is some pure Zia class from early in the event. Z (as I call him) was sitting East. (1) Weak with seven decent…

I, David Jarrett of Crumble House, Wizened Road, Decrepit-on-Seam being of sound mind, hereby declare my wishes in case I become mentally and/or physically infirm. I have enjoyed at least sixty years of healthy life, for which I am grateful. I have always believed life is for living. The presence of life itself without the mental or physical capacity to enjoy or participate in the world has no appeal to me. I do not believe suffering has meaning or gives meaning to life. To that end, I will outline how I want the final period of my life to be managed for my own best interest and the interests of my loved ones. If I develop dementia, I do not want any life-saving treatments or primary or secondary preventative medicines…

Anne Robinson (p21) left Countdown ‘to make way for an older woman'. She was on The Weakest Link. She hopes to be a dutiful Cotswolds housewife even though, for obvious reasons, she isn't married. Roger Lewis (p34 and p53) is battling with woke publishers over his book about Burton and Taylor, Erotic Vagrancy: ‘the love child of a gang-bang between James Joyce, Alf Garnett and Marilyn Monroe'. A N Wilson (p50) is one of Britain's leading writers and journalists. He has written biographies of Tolstoy, Jesus and Hitler. His first memoir, Confessions: A Life of Failed Promises, is out now. Frances Wilson (p55 and p68) is The Oldie's TV critic. She is author of Burning Man: the Ascent of DH Lawrence, Guilty Thing: A Life of Thomas De Quincey and…

Grumpy Oldie Man With etiquette experts among you in mind, I begin with a delicate question. When is it acceptable, if ever, deliberately to open someone else's mail? Etiquette apart, I suspect this is a criminal offence. Had I as many as seven seconds to lavish on research, a Google enquiry would confirm this. Sadly, owing to the cocktail of lethargy and arrogance that has for so long propelled this writer's work towards, if not over, the borderline with unreadability, I do not. But even if it is a crime knowingly to open another's post without permission, is there any circumstance in which even the hangiest and floggiest of penal enthusiasts would shrug, and mutter, ‘Mm, well, he probably doesn't deserve a stretch in Belmarsh for that'? Ladies, gentlemen and…

I t's 50 years since Sir Noël Coward died, aged 73, at his Firefly home in Jamaica, on 26th March 1973. And yet we're no nearer to doing justice to his personality and talent. T S Eliot called him ‘the real thing'. And Time magazine praised him as ‘full of cheek, chic, pose and poise' – but he was even more than that. What can you say of a man who wrote 65 plays – most of which were stonking successes in the UK and in the States – and eight musical comedies, performed hundreds of scintillating revues and cabarets, and was described by Laurence Olivier as ‘the 20th century's finest actor'? And then there all those songs from which we can all sing a line or two: Mad Dogs and…

J eremy Clarkson says he never did ‘women can't park' gags on Top Gear. Why ever not? Women are terrible at parking. I once saw four brickies leave a building site in Gray's Inn Road, each take a corner of a VW Golf and lift it into a space adequate for several coaches and horses, allowing the female owner to give up her struggle. But I am not one of those women. I passed my driving test days after my 17th birthday. (The registration-plate suffix was B.) I once chased the fraudster Emil Savundra in my Mini from halfway along the Euston Road and caught up with his Bentley by the traffic lights at Blackfriars Bridge. I wasn't far behind the rapper Jay Kay in my timing taking a reasonably…

At The Oldie's 75th-birthday party for the Queen Consort last year, Craig Brown asked me if there was still a star I craved to meet. Without hesitation, I replied, ‘Elaine May.' She turned 90 on 21st April and she lives in New York. It might be possible. In 1983, I watched her film The Heartbreak Kid (the 1972 version). I watched it in bed, more or less chewing the sheets, as a newly-wed falls in love with a girl other than his wife on his honeymoon. It occurred to me that, with such an enormous commitment made, this must sometimes happen. Elaine May is enormously famous, but we should all know her much better. She was born in Philadelphia in 1932, the daughter of a Jewish director and actor and…

As I've split my time between London and Sydney for many years, I thought – naïvely – that renting out the residence in the city from which I was absent would be a good idea. Disillusion with estate agents and occupiers descended rapidly. Initially, before leaving London, I met an agent who seemed both experienced and practical. He would, he said, have no problem renting out my West End flat. Back in Sydney, I often called for rental news and was invariably told the flat had been shown to a number of people – with no result. ‘The market is slow,' was the standard explanation. My son was at Oxford at the time. He phoned me in Sydney and said he'd been in London, was cycling past the flat and…

Country Mouse ‘If, at some future period of the world's history, men should acquire the art of flying, there can be no doubt that migration would become the custom, and whole nations would change their localities,' wrote Richard Jefferies in 1883. Seville is in my DNA through the marmalade connection and its orange season. Famous for being over almost before it has begun, the season runs from the end of December through to mid-February. This year, the season coincided with our hot-water boiler failing at precisely the same time as our daughters' planned return for a family-bonding week. Conditions in the cottage would be more intolerable than usual. As if reading my mind, my technically literate elder daughter booked a six-day break at Las Casas de la Juderia in the…

Sophia Waugh: School Days During the pandemic, two MPs, from the two main parties, said to me they believed that teachers were the unsung heroes of the lockdown. I'm not comparing what we did to what the nurses did, but our job did go some way towards holding together the fabric of society in those weird times. The teaching was substandard in the first lockdown, and miserable and depressing in the second. But the pastoral side of our work became front and centre of what we were doing. Both parents and pupils often felt we were a lifeline of normality that kept them sane. And, for those who did not manage to stay sane (some horrible family stories came out of that time), we were at least part of a…

Dame Frances Campbell-Preston, who died last year at 104, was the Queen Mother's oldest surviving lady-inwaiting. She served her from 1965 until the Queen Mother's death in 2002. She is pictured, right, on her 100th birthday. Her thanksgiving service was held at the Wren Chapel, Royal Hospital Chelsea, where she worshipped until she was 13. Her grandfather Sir Neville Lyttelton was Governor of the Hospital, 1912-31. Dame Frances remembered meeting, as a little girl, four veterans of the Crimean War at the hospital, including one who'd met Florence Nightingale. In the service sheet, Dame Frances wrote, ‘I trust my funeral will be cheerful and that the coffin will be carried out to the tune of the Regimental March of the Black Watch, to alert my husband that I am on…

In 1986, my company transferred me from London to Sydney and put me up in a small flat at the end of Darling Point, a quiet, smart part of town. Directly across the road was the United States Consulate. Apart from a flag and a discreet plaque, it looked much like all the other waterfront mansions in the area. Driving home from my new office one evening, I was surprised to see a couple of police cars outside my apartment block, with all their lights flashing. I was directed to pull over and then ordered out of my car. A beefy Sydney cop pinned me against my vehicle – but wasn't keen to explain why. I worked it out when several large black limos came round the corner. They were…

By Peter Frankopan Bloomsbury £30 The birth of my first grandchild is imminent but, frankly, who'd want to be born into the world as it is today? The planet is, as Peter Frankopan says with some relish, a vale of ‘sorrow and sadness', brought on by acid rain, the threat of nuclear apocalypse, climate change (which on its own ‘threatens the very future of the human family') and a general belief that ‘Entire ecosystems are collapsing.' To which the only possible reaction is: so what? Beginning his story several billion years BC, Frankopan chronicles nothing other than what might be called Biblical catastrophe. What mortal could have done anything about changes in the earth's orbit around the sun; the impact of giant meteorites; tectonic shifts, which create mountain ranges and…

By Oliver Soden Weidenfeld & Nicolson £30 The public persona Noël Coward first displayed to the world in the 1920s – the clipped way of speaking; the cigarette in its long holder; the tailor-made suit; the martini at hand – belied the fact that he was more often in the lonely company of his typewriter, tapping out a comic masterpiece such as Hay Fever. Then there were innumerable revue sketches and song lyrics, the controversial play The Vortex, described by Bernard Shaw as ‘damnable and wonderful', along with forgotten works. As the Rev Peter Mullen writes on page 15, Coward died 50 years ago, aged 73, on 26th March 1973. His reputation as a gadfly and man-about-town was sustained by well-timed appearances at posh cocktail parties and his natural gift…

History The Cheltenham Festival is back again this March. Cheltenham has a lot of festivals, including jazz, music, science and literature. But the only one that doesn't need a qualifier is for horse-racing. COVID couldn't stop it (and it far from stopped COVID – the 2020 Festival was a virus super-spreader) and it has been cancelled or interrupted only by war, frost, and foot and mouth. This year, its main event, the Gold Cup, will be 99 years old. But should any of that interest a historian? Don't we get enough sport in the sports pages (and in Jim White's excellent Oldie column)? Well, not many of us like war, famine, or, for that matter, the minutiae of parliamentary debate. But they are all legitimate subjects of historical enquiry. So…

‘Why do we still idolise this mixed-up mess of contradictions?' the poor viewers are asked at the start of Becoming Frida Kahlo (BBC2). ‘And why can't we take our eyes off her?' What follows are three hour-long episodes composed of footage of the famous face: the monobrow, the faint moustache, the unsmiling mouth, the black eyes boring straight through you and the hair wound round the Medusa head like a cobra. Unoriginal to the last, Becoming Frida Kahlo borrows its title from the films Becoming Jane (about Jane Austen) and Becoming Elizabeth (about Elizabeth I) – and the biographies Becoming Liz Taylor, Becoming Muhammad Ali, Becoming C S Lewis, Becoming Mrs C S Lewis, Becoming Queen Victoria, Becoming Johnny Vegas and Becoming by Michelle Obama. The implication is that we…

Sainsbury Centre, Norwich, 18th February to 17th September Once we had read Proust and Anthony Powell and reordered our gardens during lockdowns and inter-lockdowns, some of us at least made starts on writing the books we had been pondering for ages. Mine, Listening to Dry Paint, on the ways artists have deliberately put sounds into our minds, is due later in the year. I haven't yet heard of any painters inspired by the plague but Julian Stair, one of our leading potters, has had a very apposite reaction. He had already been making cinerary pots (the archaeological term; otherwise known as funerary urns) since 2012. But he concluded that more was needed in response to the pandemic: ‘I don't think the victims of the pandemic, let alone the survivors, have…

The disappearance of destination restaurants such as Noma in Copenhagen (three Michelin stars, five times best-on-planet) seems likely to continue. This means that none of us will, for the sake of gastronomic credibility, have to scrape up the cash and book a year ahead for a mouthful of reindeer heart smoked over spruce needles. Perhaps the era of superstar chef presiding over 20-course tasting menus is over. The legacy of the best of them, however, is a treasure trove of romantically illustrated cookbooks, some of which contain surprisingly down-to-earth advice. Celebrate April Fool's Day – in France, poisson d'avril – with a nostalgic plateful, as served in El Celler de Can Roca in Girona, Catalonia, still thriving. El Celler is still going strong because chef-proprietor Joan Roca has a more…

A friend of mine's mother had a childhood obsession with Stenhousemuir Football Club. As she grew up, listening to Sports Report on BBC Radio, it became a family preoccupation that the Scottish lower-league club always seemed to be announced by James Alexander Gordon in the day's classified football results as not having scored a goal. She even believed this was the operation's full name: Stenhousemuir Nil. Some years ago, she mentioned her youthful fascination to her son and asked him the question that had been on her mind for so long. What on earth was it that lay behind the decision to name the club not United or City, Rovers, County or Town but Nil? Having put her right, my friend decided the best gift for her imminent significant birthday…

IN COMPETITION No 290 you were invited to write a poem, Spring Cleaning, as an acrostic with the first letter of each line spelling out the title. I don't know if the extra requirement made the poems better, but rhyme and metre usually do. Tony Bartlett pretended to quibble about the meaning of ‘spring': ‘Pram spring? Mattress? Trampoline?/Rusty after years of use.' Con Connell had Mrs Shakespeare giving her husband sound advice: ‘Not that you would ever lose Love's Labour/ If you tried to keep your desk a bit more tidy…' Andrew Bamji introduced a note of class war: ‘Now I know you rich bastards are having a laugh/ Gaily boasting, “No problem – for we have got staff!” ' G M Southgate looked forward to ‘Noting the worktops/ Need…

Next year I shall be 80. But am I a sad old biddy, taking buckets of pills every day, grappling with a dodgy hip, high blood pressure, osteoporosis and rheumy eyes? I am not. Apart from a certain amount of annoying hearing loss, I would say that I am as fit and healthy as I was 30 or 40 years ago. Every day I am climbing up and down 50 steps to my fourth-floor flat and I walk with a spring in my step. Most years, I go on a walking holiday, often over tough terrain. But that is not all. The secret to my continuing good health into what many people might consider extreme old age is, I believe, mainly down to my rigid daily exercise routine. I started…

Having witnessed over many decades the multitude of sufferings and indignities nature, aided and abetted by modern medicine, can heap upon the elderly, I had a stab at my own living statement and living will. These are my first attempts at expressing my wishes for the future, should I become mentally incapable of deciding things for myself). How much life might I be depriving myself of? A year or two? A few months? That is in the lap of the gods. Many human perceptions such as the passage of time can be measured accurately – say, using a clock. There is a hypothesis in psychophysics – Weber's Law – which explains that what we can perceive as a change in a stimulus is proportional to the scale of the original…

O ld Age ain't no place for sissies, as Bette Davis said It certainly ain't for women. No sooner are the demanding child-bearing years over, than the mighty menopause comes along to whisk the wind out of your sails. Literally. Say goodbye to your friendly hormones oestrogen, progesterone and testosterone (yes, women have that too) and say hello to what can be all the debilitating and long-term consequences of not having those hormones – ranging from symptoms like hot flushes and night sweats, to anxiety, depression, brain fog, poor memory, lack of energy and lack of libido. All this would have been of no concern to the average new-born girl in 1841 – not expected to see her 43rd birthday. But it is of immense concern to women now, who…

Life being what it is – a temporary experience – insightful readers will be familiar with the question that arises when visiting a doctor. ‘Is this it?' And anyone who has sat in the waiting room for a first visit to the ophthalmologist will know the inner voice which asks, ‘How am I going to face the possibility of going blind?' Both anxieties, while reasonable, tend to exaggerate the likelihood of catastrophe. When it comes to eyes, the exaggeration is greater. As far as we know, everybody, in the end, gets an interview with St Peter, but very, very few people become blind, at least in the sense that the word is generally understood. The distinction between properly blind (unable to see) and technically blind is worth making. The difference…

Magpie can't fly after having one too many fermented apples Metro Banana thrown in chair row Chester Standard £15 for published contributions NEXT ISSUE The May issue is on sale on 5th April 2023. GET THE OLDIE APP Go to App Store or Google Play Store. Search for Oldie Magazine and then pay for app. OLDIE BOOKS The Very Best of The Oldie Cartoons, The Oldie Annual 2023 and other Oldie books are available at: www.theoldie.co.uk/readers-corner/shop Free p&p. OLDIE NEWSLETTER Go to the Oldie website; put your email address in the red SIGN UP box. HOLIDAY WITH THE OLDIE Go to www.theoldie.co.uk/courses-tours…

what was a bottom drawer? A bottom drawer was the term used to denote the gradual accumulation of bedlinen, crockery, cutlery and other household goods that would be useful to a girl when she got married. It wasn't always an actual drawer. In America, it was known as a hope chest. Embroidered tablecloths and the like would be handed down from previous generations and lovingly folded in the bottom drawer as heirlooms. The phrase arose in the Victorian era, when the bottom drawer of a chest was not only the largest, but also the least used and least accessible. It could be used to store items that weren't immediately needed. The concept goes back much further. In 15th-century Florence, marriage chests, known as cassoni, were commissioned to celebrate weddings between…

One of the recent highlights on the Talking Pictures TV channel was Konga (1961), the tale of Dr Charles Decker, a mad scientist played by Michael Gough at his most fiendish. He employs a growth serum on a chimpanzee, transforming his simian friend into a stunt performer wearing a gorilla costume. Unfortunately, the doctor is also given to shooting his pets, ranting, ‘You fool! Do you think I want the biggest experiment of my life menaced by a cat? Even those few drops might have made Tabby swell up to huge proportions!' Konga was produced by Herman Cohen, the genius behind I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1975). He claimed the cost of his British masterpiece was $1 million and that it boasted the new SpectaMation trick-photography system. The result was…

A rgentina was never a placid sort of place. But my father, Ronald Grove, was well used to its turbulent ways. At64, he had lived in Buenos Aires for over a quarter of a century, as head of the Vestey family's huge meat-packing business. So he was not unduly concerned when a visit by ex-President Perón early in 1972, after a €ƒ-year exile in Madrid, stirred up a surge of activity by left-wing urban guerrilla groups. He did know he might be on their hit list, especially as he'd recently had to lay off hundreds of workers. Even so, back in London, where I was a leader-writer on the Evening Standard, I was startled when my father offhandedly mentioned that he was now varying his route to work and had a…

There are no specific numbers of how many shops selling British chocolates, sweets, food, and memorabilia exist in Canada, but estimates are in the hundreds. They began in the 1970s, catering to a small niche market. Back then, before the internet, British Sunday papers would arrive by Monday lunchtime and these shops were the best places to buy them. As online news developed and hardcopy papers were less in demand, these relatively few shops branched out into selling food. By the early 1990s, the number of shops selling British chocolate and biscuits had multiplied. In Toronto there are at least a dozen. In towns around the metropolis, that number quadruples. With names such as British Pride, Across the Pond, the Scottish Loft, the products on offer vary with the seasons…

Postcards from the Edge I am now marking 60 years as a working scribe. I favour the word ‘scribe' rather than ‘hack'. The latter implies, surely implausibly, that a journalist will do anyone's bidding for money. There have been vast changes in the media since my debut in journalism in 1963. With the march of technology, this is only natural – things have changed everywhere else, too. But what's striking is the revolution in values. Almost everything once considered acceptable is now the opposite. Being reprimanded by your boss is now called ‘bullying'. If we complained, we were told, ‘If you can't stand the heat, don't come into the kitchen.' There wasn't such a sense of horror around paedophilia in the old days, deplorable as it is. I was informed,…

• Only 11 per cent of professional authors make a living from their writing. • One in five Britons cannot name a single author of literature. • Aristotle had a lisp. • Jonathan Swift invented the name Vanessa. • James Joyce took 17 years to write Finnegans Wake. • Rudyard Kipling painted his golf balls red so he could play in the snow. • Flaubert lived with his mother until he was 51. • Daniel Defoe began his first novel, The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, aged 60. • Brendan Behan became an alcoholic at the age of eight. • JM Barrie, author of Peter Pan, was under five feet tall and didn't shave till he was 24. • When Roald Dahl was six, his mother took him…

The The Doctor Doctor's Surgery As Dr Johnson was terrified of madness, so most of us are terrified of dementia, both for our own sake and for that of our loved ones. If anything can stave it off, it is much to be welcomed. It has long been known that there is an association between deafness and dementia. If there is a causative relationship, in which direction does it flow, or could it flow in both directions? If deafness causes dementia, how does it do so and could the wearing of hearing aids reduce the risk of developing it? It is possible that the two conditions, deafness and dementia, develop pari passu, by a similar mechanism, for example by vascular damage. Loss of mental stimulus because of deafness could also…

It seemed worth a try. Sipping my White Cap beer in Nairobi's celebrated Thorn Tree Café, I noticed the small ad in a well-thumbed English newspaper: ‘Egon Ronay seeks hotel and restaurant inspectors.' Well, I'd made it through catering college and cooked professionally before setting off to busk and bum. With my cash reserves down to zilch, I scribbled off a few lines to Britain's ‘Mr Gastronomy', extolling admittedly limited virtues and not expecting any sort of reply. To my great surprise, an envelope was waiting when I arrived home in early December, wearing nothing but a kikoi and a pair of flip-flops to honour my side of a £50 bet I'd desperately needed to win to see me through the last of my African days. I managed to somehow bluff…

By Margaret Atwood Chatto & Windus £22 These 15 stories by Margaret Atwood are a mixed bag. The first three and the last four feature an elderly couple called Tig and Nell. They are based, I imagine, on Atwood herself (now aged 83) and her husband, Graham Gibson, who died in 2019. The eight stories that form the book's core explore a variety of themes, some fantastical and futuristic. There is an interview between the author and George Orwell, who speaks through a medium in a séance. There's a version of Patient Griselda, as told by an alien. In one tale, the soul of a snail translates into the body of a bank clerk, and in another, two best friends squabble over their memories of the past. The degeneration of…

By Pamela Anderson Headline £20 Pamela Anderson is the Sleeping Beauty of Baywatch, exuding sex and death. Now she has written a memoir whose title amounts to a rebuke: Love, Pamela. It means: I can still love. Baywatch, the TV show about lifeguards at a Los Angeles beach, was the most popular television show in the world, with over a billion viewers in the 1990s. I didn't watch it but still I knew her: an innocent with a peculiar sweetness of face and charming gaucherie – and the sort of body you see in pornographic films. She says it herself: she was a child when all this began. She is one of the late-20th century's noble sequence of tortured pop-art blondes. Because the world has changed, she is writing her…

The powder monkey at the Battle of Trafalgar writes, ‘We had to leave our Quarters 2 get breath.' So boys of 17 were using text messaging in 1805. Plus ça change. Dr Pam Macdonald, University of Wales academic Paolo Coelho writes because he wants to be loved. I read because I want to be interested. At this point, it's hard to say which of us is the more disappointed. Adam Mars-Jones, review of The Zahir by Coelho No sovereign, no court, no personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, no palaces, no castles, no manors, nor old country houses, nor parsonages, nor thatched cottages, nor abbeys, nor little Norman churches, no great universities, nor public schools – no Oxford, nor Eton,…

It's 150 years since the birth in a Naples slum on 25th February 1873 of the great Italian tenor Enrico Caruso. His mother's 18th child, and the first to survive infancy, he would become one of the most famous men of his age. 2023 is a vintage year for remembering singers whose art transcends the familiar ravages of time. Caruso's friend the mighty bass Chaliapin was born into a Russian peasant family just 12 days before him. And December will bring the centenary of the birth of Maria Callas. The gramophone helps preserve their work. And it was Caruso who effectively ‘made' the medium one afternoon in Milan in April 1902. ‘Fee exorbitant, forbid you to record,' was the cable the Gramophone Company sent producer Fred Gaisberg, another gramophone pioneer…

‘That dinner cost £4 a minute,' said Bill Knott, The Oldie's drinks correspondent. Forty minutes after arriving at RedFarm, the Covent Garden offspring of the famous New York dim-sum restaurant, we had finished. Bill was right. The waitress brought all our dishes so quickly that we had no choice but to leave and find comfort at the Lady of the Grapes wine bar, in Maiden Lane. Confirming his epitaph (‘Never one to mince his words'), Bill expanded on his theme. ‘That's about the same rate per minute as Marcus Wareing charges at the Berkeley.' All I could think about was the meal deal I had bought at Sainsbury's the day before: £3.50 for a sandwich, a packet of crisps and a San Pellegrino. I calculated that Bill and I could…

James May, one of the brightest stars in the Top Gear firmament, has had an EV (electric vehicle) since 2014. His current stable includes a Tesla Model S, a hydrogen Toyota and a Porsche 911. Writing in the Telegraph recently, he described himself not as an EV evangelist but as ‘an intrigued participant in the experiment'. He enjoys his Tesla but for longer journeys uses his Porsche 911. The reason? Not range anxiety – he reckons the range of the Tesla and many other EVs is not a serious problem – but the ‘ball-aching inconvenience of public charging'. Not only because there are too few public charging points but because it takes too long to charge. A lot of research goes into extending battery range, yet range is not really…

Among the brightest of the spring migrants is the redstart (Phoenicurus phoenicurus). The male is more glorious, with a vivid head and orange breast in addition to the orange (red) tail and rump – also the startling feature of the paler female, which gives the bird its name. ‘Start' is from Anglo-Saxon ‘steort' (tail). Phoenicurus is from the Greek phonikouros (firetail) bestowed by Aristotle, father of natural science, from phoenix, firebird of Egyptian mythology. Among the bird's English folk names are firetail and brantail. It belongs to the thrush (Turdidae) family, which includes the robin, whose ‘red' breast and sky-blue eggs are a match, and the chats (stonechat etc). They all delight in fanning, quivering – and, in the redstart's case, thereby setting alight with colour – their tails. John…

Taking a Walk When I last walked on Scout Scar, some 20 years ago, I helped my mum scatter Grandpa's ashes. I should remember the day clearly, but I don't. There was wind, straggly hawthorn and a sense of completing a task, I think, but this vertiginous ridge of limestone with preposterously fine views everywhere is lodged in my memory from other walks with Grandpa. In his latter days, slowing up, he eschewed the high fells of his home county and stumped along its lovely limestone edges, from Gatebarrow to Whitbarrow, with his Border Collie, Tess. I returned to Scout Scar recently while visiting Kendal for its Mountain Festival. The town hummed with impressive outdoorsy folk. Even in the bleak winter, head torches bounced down footpaths after dark. The breath…

Across 1 Smudged, labelled (6) 4 ___ Rooney, footballer (5) 8 Dance venue (5) 9 Unlawful (7) 10 Stomach (7) 11 Shock, daze (4) 12 Greyish-brown (3) 14 Bill of fare (4) 15 Supplies weapons to (4) 18 Take a pew (3) 21 Skin disorder (4) 23 Make lively (7) 25 Yield, buckle under pressure (7) 26 Sky blue (5) 27 Throw out forcibly (5) 28 Shooting star (6) Down 1 Foolishly impulsive (6) 2 The remains (of an estate, e.g) (7) 3 Gigantic (8) 4 Metal joint (4) 5 Sailing boat (5) 6 Stretch (6) 7 Demon (5) 13 Pilot (8) 16 Step, yardstick (7) 17 Harass, bother (6) 19 Mottled (cat) (5) 20 Thin facade (6) 22 Mother-of-pearl (5) 24 Resign, stop (4) Genius 422 solution Winner: Miriam…

Son-in-law a bad cop? Q I am a 70-year-old man with a daughter who's been married to a police officer. I have never liked him, but have been civil for my daughter's sake. Now, with the recent revelations about the Met, I feel I don't want his company. I shall shortly be faced with the choice between visiting them or not. What do you suggest? I can see that my feeling is irrational in that he himself is blameless for – though perhaps aware of – the toxic culture, but feelings are not always rational, are they? I'm sure I cannot be the only one in this position. M F, Leicester A You have behaved impeccably so far. And visiting your daughter despite your dislike of her husband has been…

I David Jarrett of Weary Cottage, Exhausted Lane, Knackeredton, do declare that I am of sound mind and hereby state my preferences for care if I become physically and/or mentally incapable of caring for myself. me in any way and do not expect or I do not want much fuss made of want my children's or grandchildren's lives to be burdened with my care in any significant way. Their lives now take precedence over my declining life. home for as long as possible but if I I would like to remain in my own need institutional care, then nothing should be done to unduly prolong that care (see my living will). I do not take sugar in tea or coffee. I have always enjoyed the grain and the grape and…

By the time Luli Harvey reached her 70s, her entire adult life had been spent in London. It was where she'd worked hard, married – and divorced – twice, and raised her three children, happily forging a rich, busy existence. Even so, the countryside called to her. It's a fantasy familiar to many of course, nourished by Escape to the Country and an endless list of books stretching back to H E Bates's 50s fiction The Darling Buds of May and beyond. The difference was that Harvey made the dream a reality – and not just as a septuagenarian, but single-handedly and during Covid lockdowns. Its pursuit forced her to focus on a question that too many of her peers ignore until it's too late, she says: how to facilitate…

Family history research used to be a matter of people in woolly hats and anoraks looking for tombstones. Today, genealogy is cool. The TV series Who Do You think You Are?, which reveals the forbears of celebrities and their secrets, regularly attracts 6 million viewers. The boom in family history research is one of the unexpected consequences of the internet revolution. The digitisation of so many records which until recently were inaccessible or unknown has prompted a new and exciting way of engaging with the past. Family history uses computer skills which appeal to younger people. A new profession of skilled family historians has emerged. I teach a course in biography at Buckingham University, and many of my students join because they want to research their family history. Thanks to…

Experts are excellent. Specialising in a subject created professions and professionalism, giving birth to the middle classes, the foundation of Britain's wealth Despite claims to the contrary, Britons are not dismissive of those with expertise. It is so-called (and often self-appointed) gurus you should beware. One area with more than its fair share of gurus – and where people have lost significant amounts of money - is cryptocurrency. With their voices amplified through social-media platforms, the cryptoevangelists talked a good story about the future of money. Fans of cryptocurrencies want to take the government out of money. Many people – arguably justifiably given their recent track record – don't trust central banks, believing these institutions will devalue their wealth by manipulating the value of money to suit the whims of…

Every profession has its particular joys and particular trials. That's certainly true, for us clergy, of funeral or memorial service eulogies. They can delight and enlighten, revealing marvellous un-looked-for truths about the deceased, her life, work and influence – or they can gravely embarrass, dwelling on everything you'd rather not know about the departed. Or they can be, at great length, excruciatingly boring. We clergy have a way of dealing with this – you don't get to be a CofE vicar without learning that expression of benign interest (it fools no-one). If you're invited, coerced or blackmailed into delivering a eulogy, then the basic rule of life obtains: context is all, influencing not just what, but how it is said – and context embraces what and where. First, is it…