Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2023 i The Oldie

Gyles Brandreth's Diary Sadly, I didn't know Jane Birkin, the Anglo-French actress, singer and beauty, who died in Paris in mid-July at the age of 76. I had admired her since I was a teenager and saw her, naked, in Antonioni's seminal Sixties movie, Blow-Up. Later, I got to know the star of the film, David Hemmings (19412003). He told me that Birkin only agreed to get her kit off in Blow-Up because her husband at the time, John Barry, taunted her, saying she wouldn't dare. David explained that Jane was very self-conscious about her diminutive bust, but claimed he had reassured her with the line, ‘Who'll be looking at your breasts, darling, when your face is so lovely?’ Happily, I did know Jane Birkin's mother, the actress Judy Campbell…

WHAT IS an NPC? NPC stands for non-player character. It describes the characters in computer games that the player doesn't control. The ghosts in Pac-Man, the eponymous expeditionary force in Space Invaders, the villagers you interact with in Zelda, the bystanders you run down in Grand Theft Auto – these are all examples of non-player characters. NPCs are crude forms of artificial intelligence and essential parts of just about any game you could care to play. They run along predictable paths, as dictated by the programmers. The aim is usually to better them using your superior human intelligence. After a few plays, you realise the best way to kill a Cacodemon in Doom is to throw a ‘frag’ grenade into their mouth, or that the best way to score a…

A psychotherapist once told me that around half her patients were middle-aged women trying to come to terms with not having children. As someone who almost missed motherhood myself, I was struck by this and began wondering why my generation of female oldies had been so easily seduced by the idea of having it all when, simply, we could not. When I arrived at Cambridge University at the end of the Seventies, there were still far fewer women than men. Those of us who'd somehow barged our way into this male-dominated bastion were made to feel like high-achieving pioneers, convinced we'd go on to have glittering careers, unlike most of our mothers. My mother, a highly intelligent, competent woman, neither attended university nor worked. She was so in awe of…

Andrew Birkin, Jane Birkin's brother, and I were illicit smoking buddies at Harrow. His mother, Judy Campbell, and my father, Hugh Williams, were West End stars. Judy performed A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square – perhaps it was from her that her daughter Jane learnt the subtle skill of not-singing. Best of all, Andrew had a sister, Jane, whom I fell in love with before even meeting her. I too had a sister, Polly, and we soon became a foursome. It was a special time – we were innocents halfway out of childhood – we played it cool, we jived and blew smoke rings; we played kick-the-can. One Easter holiday, Andrew wrote a short film, a tragic story of a toff who falls in love with a working-class girl who…

Today the word Chanel conjures up sugary tweeds and perfume. In fact, Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel was the 20th century's most influential designer. During a 60-year career, her designs shaped generations, from the 1926 little black dress to the famed suit of the Fifties. She died in the Ritz in 1971, aged 87, after working all day. And now a new V&A show is paying tribute to her genius. Chanel used rich and aristocratic men as a climbing frame to bankroll and promote her. She constantly refreshed her designs, running an empire by her forties, and outlived all her competitors. But her meteoric rise had a dismal start. She was born illegitimate to market traders in 1883. Her mother died when Chanel was 11 and her father sold her two brothers…

Ever wanted to disappear? Just slip out of the house one day and start a new life in a new place with a new identity? How easy is it? A bunch of new books by or about people who have been ‘on the run’, sometimes for decades, are full of tips – and warnings – about how to vanish. It's 60 years since the Great Train Robbery took place on 8th August 1963. It led to the arrest of a dozen or so suspects and the jailing of some of them for 30 years. Those long sentences would prompt the robbers still at large to flee and others to escape from prison and disappear. The mastermind, Bruce Reynolds, fled to Mexico with his wife, Frances, and young son, Nick. The…

History In these sensitive times, when hurt feelings can start a witch hunt and end careers, it's no surprise that historians have come over all emotional. There are centres for the study of the history of emotions in London, Berlin and across Australia and the United States. Historians in France and Sweden research the emotions of the Middle Ages and ‘pre-modernity’. In 2015, the British historian Thomas Dixon re-examined our island story through a misty lens, in his book Weeping Britannia. A new book by the New York-based historian Robert Peckham takes a single emotion and uses it to frame ‘An alternative history of the world’: fear. He takes us from the terrifying march of mortality of the 14th-century Black Death, via the religious fears of the Reformation and the…

Postcards from the Edge Two French ideas are worth copying. One is that cash is categorised as legal tender, and payment in readies cannot be refused: no signs in shops saying, ‘card payment only’. The abolition of cash not only means the banks control our lives (and can therefore ‘de-bank’ us if they choose, as in the Nigel Farage case). The disappearance of cash is also unfair to the poor, to charities and to those whose livelihood is helped by tips, and by grandparents who enjoy the pleasure of slipping a grandchild a tenner – somehow more spontaneous than a financial transfer. And who doesn't derive a small glow of virtue in dropping a couple of coins into a busker's mendicant cap? The second admirable measure of President Macron's administration…

Sophia Waugh: School Days Oracy is all the rage these days. While the newspapers howled at the word, it has been used in schools for as long as I have been teaching. It does not seem to be unreasonable to suggest that our school-leavers should be able to add up and talk clearly. One of my daughters just sent me a message from her holiday with a family which includes some teenagers. ‘Thank you, mum, for teaching us how to hold a conversation,’ she wrote. ‘We can all talk to anyone. I wish the teenagers here could.’ She compared the difference in articulacy between two of the guests, a 14-year-old public-school boy and another from a state school, two years older. My children may have been brought up by a…

Donald Trelford was editor of the Observer from 1975 to 1993 – and was also acting editor of The Oldie, when Richard Ingrams took a sabbatical. Former Observer journalist Bob Low led tributes to him at St Bride's in Fleet Street. He said Trelford's 18 years in charge at the Observer ‘would be unusual in today's world, where editors have the life expectancy of football managers – or prime ministers’. Low said, ‘People often compared him to the Sunday Times editor Harry Evans, with whom he had much in common: both diminutive in stature, from working-class or at best lower middle-class provincial backgrounds, the first in their family to go to university – Donald to Cambridge – and both learned their trade on provincial papers. ‘What few realised is that,…

It was 1943. I was 21 years old, and in half of what they used to call a ‘sister act’. We were staying at an extremely plush hotel in Damascus. I'd met my dancing partner, Pauline, while performing with a troop of Tiller Girls in Aladdin at the Prince of Wales Theatre in Birmingham. We managed to get a booking at Collins’ Music Hall in Islington and were seen by Bob Lecardo, the man in charge of variety for the Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA). Lecardo offered us a contract and so it was that, full of patriotic fervour, we soon found ourselves being shipped off to the Middle East aboard the SS Volendam along with the Phoenix Varieties. I think we sailed from Liverpool (during the war, there were…

Moronic adverts Admen once aspired to wit or cleverness, but the target audience today seems to be the illiterate or moronic. ‘Live Brilliant,’ shouts Hyundai. ‘Eat More Amazing,’ urges Deliveroo. ‘Find Your Happy,’ says Right Move. If you've already found it, Tui wants you to ‘Live Happy’. Deliveroo's ‘Amazing’ has to share the stage with ‘Let's Do Amazing’ (Hewlett Packard) and Lexus's ‘Experience Amazing’. Note the banishing of the adverb: Old Speckled Hen's ‘Drink Curious’. Another subset appeals to the narcissistic. ProTan's can of lotion proclaims: ‘It's All About Me!’ Tu (whatever that is) begs you to ‘Be You with Tu’, though Holiday Inn goes one step further with ‘Stay You’. Amex is resigned: ‘Keep Being You’, a useful followup to Diet Coke's ‘You Do You’. Jack Daniels pushes the…

‘Beyond the Fringe first fell upon London like a sweet refreshing rain on 10 May 1961,’ wrote Michael Frayn. ‘That night, the theatre came of age,’ wrote Kenneth Tynan. Bernard Levin called it ‘brilliant, adult, hard-boiled, accurate, merciless, witty, unexpected, alive, exhilarating, cleansing, right, true and good’. Levin was OTT but, at 15, I agreed. Fringe paved the way for Private Eye, TW3, the Pythons… Jeremy Front's play Behind Beyond the Fringe (Radio 4) retold the story. John Bassett of the Edinburgh Festival assembled the distinctive Oxbridge quartet. Don Alan Bennett and Dudley (‘the piano's his forte’) Moore were both Oxonians from state grammars. Then there were the two Cantabs from public schools, junior doctor Jonathan Miller and revue-writer Peter Cook. Bassett introduced the four over lunch and lured them…

This summer, something happened. I went to New Zealand during Glasto and British Summer Time, therefore missing Lizzo and Elton, and then the Boss. I lost my AirPods. When I went to the Cyclades, from where I write, I failed to connect my iPhone to my Bose speaker in the Aristide Hotel, Syros, and gave up. When we were lent a car on the dock in Tinos, there was an empty slot where the radio was. In Sifnos, the rental car had a radio but when I tried to tune it to some bouzouki, I failed and found only warbling static. I switched it off with relief. Katy Perry sang she kissed a girl and she liked it. Well, I found the sound of silence and I liked it even…

The tea gardens of Tregothnan, near Truro, Cornwall, have been producing tea from camellia leaves (Camellia sinensis) for nearly 20 years. The bushes were started in a protected kitchen garden above the river Fal, on an acidic soil with a microclimate of warmth and mist where winter is largely avoided. Growing these leaves in a garden at home isn't recommended, but tea from the flowers of camomile is a more feasible proposition. German camomile is an annual which grows to twice the height of the perennial Roman variety. Grown from seed, the latter can be sown in autumn, and should produce small, daisy-like flowers the following spring. The plants will tolerate drought, and tea can be made using the flowers, fresh or dried. Apart from its refreshing taste, camomile has…

I thought I was too long in the tooth, my palate too jaded. But then it happened: a blinding flash, an alcoholic epiphany. I discovered a new drink. Well, maybe not exactly new. Cachaça, a spirit made from sugar cane and the national firewater of Brazil, is the hooch in a Caipirinha, a cocktail that an old Brazilian flatmate of mine was wont to whip up any time the mercury clambered above 20C, or Brazil scored a goal. The cachaça was whatever he could find and his method was simple: chop a lime into eight pieces, bash them in a big rocks glass with a tablespoonful of demerara sugar, add a generous slug of cachaça, stir and top up with ice. But, until I met Vini Kodama, the head bartender…

I yield to few in my enthusiasm for technological advance. But even I think that, in the race to become a wholly digital world, we can go too far. After years of being badgered by my dentist, I bought an electric toothbrush. I was baffled by the range. The recommended brand offered a dozen options, with a choice of four different brush heads for each. The price range was eye-watering, too, ranging from £40 (which is bad enough) to an astonishing £500 – for a toothbrush. Naturally, I bought one at the bottom end of the range, and the cheerful delivery fellow delivered it the next day. Then the digital overkill began. To my slack-jawed astonishment, it came with instructions to download an app. My new toothbrush would then connect…

Taking a Walk Rock-climbing, skydiving, abseiling – these are risky ways of getting from A to B. Taking a walk is not. So, I wasn't pondering the fragility of existence when I forayed with my son, Ted, into Abbot's Wood, a forest near where the South Downs meet the sea. When we set out, walking on a pavement beside a dual carriageway for a hundred yards, a BMW skidded on the wet road and slid onto the pavement 50 yards ahead. If we had departed a minute earlier, we would have been under its wheels. Ted was very taken with this drama while I strode as briskly as possible to the steps away from the A22 and its roaring, sliding demon motor-monsters. It was an unsettlingly windy, warm summer's day,…

Across 1 Ground beef, pork etc (5) 4 Mare, stallion etc (5) 8 A flying saucer? (3) 9 Offi cially approve automatically (6-5) 10 Conjecture, reckon (7) 12 Plight one's ___ (5) 13 Plasterer's requirement (6) 14 Curiously oldfashioned (6) 17 Origins (5) 19 Mortified, remorseful (7) 21 Showing no feeling (11) 23 Racket (3) 24 Goggle box (5) 25 Merits (5) Down 1 Social customs (5) 2 Essence, crux (3) 3 Ugly sight, esp. a building (7) 4 Youth ___, accommodation (6) 5 Eg Lamb or beef joint (5) 6 Large? valved sort of tuba (9) 7 Hotpots (anag) (7) 11 Supporter or advocate of cause (9) 13 Missile; scupper (7) 15 Hug nine (anag) (7) 16 Equality (in pay, for example) (6) 18 School of fish (5) 20…

I was honoured to be asked to run the Stuart Wheeler Memorial Bridge week at Carol and Charlie Skinner's delightful villa on Paxos. They were such generous hosts and the week could not have gone better (well, maybe I could have held a few more aces – these things do matter when you are playing for £20 per hundred). Here is a tricky Six Clubs – I was East. Dealer South North-South The bidding Declarer ruffed West's queen-of-spades lead in dummy then cashed the ace of diamonds, shedding a heart, and followed with the queen. I could see that if I ducked, declarer could discard another loser, then lead the queen of clubs, and I would be left without recourse. I therefore covered the queen of diamonds with the king.…

IN COMPETITION No 296 you were invited to write a poem called Leftovers. Daphne Lester gave a memorable picture of her grandmother shutting the cat in the larder by mistake. Erika Fairhead wrote in the voice of compost worms, ‘We thrive on plant material, / Old rags and bits of cereal.’ Mike Morrison pictured three old maids, ‘Hilda, Ena and Betty, three cowards to confetti’, at the funeral of a missed opportunity. Sue Smalley's narrator declared, ‘I'm happy sitting quietly on my shelf. / A leftover relies upon herself.’ Commiserations to them and to I White, Hilary Caine, Basil Ransome-Davies, Katie Mallett, Stefan Badham and Max Ross; and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to Peter Hollindale.…

John Lloyd (p20 and p47) wrote The Meaning of Liffwith Douglas Adams. He produced The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Not the Nine O'Clock News, Blackadder, Spitting Image and QI. Simon Williams (p23) was James Bellamy in Upstairs, Downstairs. He and his wife Lucy Fleming play her parents, Peter Fleming and Celia Johnson, in Posting Letters to the Moon. Duncan Campbell (p34) was the Guardian's crime correspondent and LA correspondent. He wrote If It Bleeds, The Paradise Trail, The Underworld and That Was Business, This Is Personal. Nicky Haslam (p54) is an interior designer who performs the songs of his friend Cole Porter. His tea-towel list of common things includes ‘Swimming with dolphins’ and ‘Jiggling your knee’.…

Grumpy Oldie Man Is there a more comical phrase, from the mouth of someone pushing 60, than ‘I'm an orphan now'? There may be rivals. ‘Suella Braverman,’ for example, ‘she's nice.’ Or ‘I love flying Ryanair.’ For all that, there is something so innately amusing about a decaying sea monster echoing a red-haired moppet singing about tomorrow being a day away… Suffice it to know that I've been using that line relentlessly of late, and been rewarded with grins. Orphanhood commenced in late July, when my mother died almost immediately after the news broke about Sinéad O'Connor. She was buried in August at exactly the same time as the Irish singer. They had little else in common. My mother had the hideous singing voice she bequeathed me via her DNA,…

I n my early twenties, my best friend was a tall, clumsy genius called Douglas Adams. In 1978, he had got stuck writing the first series for BBC Radio 4 of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and asked me to help him finish it. We'd written together often before – so I said yes. ‘I don't suppose there'll be a second series, Johnny,’ he said, ‘but, if there is, let's do it together.’ It had taken Douglas 10 months to write the first four scripts, but we polished off the last two in three weeks. The series was an instant success and, before it had even finished going out, we'd been invited to lunch by no less than six publishers. We signed with Nick Webb at New English Library…

Ten years before Nigel Farage was de-banked, I sensed it was all going wrong behind the Coutts pepperpot façade in the Strand. So I sacked the royal bankers. It was a hard decision. I had been a member of Coutts & Co for 41 years. But I had to leave because it was no longer the bank I joined in 1972. The manager of the Norwich Coutts offi ce wore a frock coat, wing collar and cravat. He signed me in with his quill pen. Mr Masters then visited me at home, met my wife, opened an account for her and promised one for our baby daughter when she grew up, which happened as night follows day. It was that sort of bank, friendly but correct. We were encouraged to…

We credit Elizabeth I for all sorts of achievements. Turning down Phillip II of Spain's proposal of marriage in 1559 was astute. Encouraging Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh in their explorations paid dividends. But so too was recognising the importance of shoehorns – known variously in the past as ‘shoespooners’, ‘shoe schlipps’ and ‘shoe tongues’. Between 1563 and 1566, Her Majesty ordered?? of them from her shoemaker, Garrett Johnson, and promptly dispensed them to members of her household who were struggling every morning to put on their boots. Then, three years later, she acquired a further three, made in steel from the blacksmiths Gilbert Polson and Richard Jeffrey. The shoehorn's origin goes back further. A ‘schoying horne’ is referred to in literature from the??th century – and strikes…

Town Mouse Mrs Mouse and I were recently invited to dinner by friends who live in Rowley Way. It's a curious street in north London, next to Abbey Road – as in the album by the Beatles. Rowley Way is the unofficial name for the Alexandra and Ainsworth Estate, a housing scheme of 520 flats and houses built in 1978 by the architect Neave Brown. Now, like many Oldie readers, I am guessing, I have an in-built prejudice against modern, Brutalist buildings. My favoured architectural styles are 18th and 19th century and medieval. I'd like to live in Dr Johnson's house or a medieval manor. I actually do live in a Victorian terrace in west London, with cornices and open fires. It's great, and very neighbourly. My friend's flat has…

Mary Killen's Beauty Tips It is almost always sensually pleasurable and stress-relieving to be tampered with while unclothed. When the opportunity arises, and if we can afford it, I'm often tempted to have a massage – a treat or spa massage as opposed to a medical massage. But spa massages should not be viewed as self-indulgent or time-wasting. On the contrary. They often send us into a profound, deeply relaxing daytime sleep. To quote the late guru Betty Parsons, ‘You are never wasting time when you are recharging your batteries.’ It's so pleasant to feel the touch of another human's hands on your skin. Radio Four's Inside Health programme once looked into the phenomenon of tickling therapy. Was it to be the Next Big Thing? We heard testimonies from converts…

• The most commonly asked question at Hanna-Barbera's head office is: ‘What did Barney Rubble of The Flintstones do for a living?’ • When The O? ice? rst aired in 2001, it had the secondlowest audience appreciation score on the BBC after women's bowling. • The Swiss Air Force monitors its airspace round the clock but only Ricky Gervais in The Office intercepts illegal flights during office hours. • When he was Chancellor, George Osborne kept a padlock on his office fridge. • In the Cabinet Office at 10 Downing Street, the Prime Minister's chair is the only one with arms. • Until 1993, the location of the Post Office Tower was an O? icial Secret. It was illegal to photograph it and it didn't appear on any maps. Until the First…

It was a sunny evening on 6th June 1942. My young aunt, Ditty, suggested we should take a trip to the local shop to buy a bottle of lemonade. There were lots of people in Gurney Street, London, with children playing, enjoying the short period before dark when a siren announced the nightly bombing raids. My mother watched from the window to see how I walked with my orthopaedic shoe for my right leg — I had contracted polio two years previously, when I was two. We had just crossed the road when the bomb exploded. Everything blew up, buildings were destroyed and all the people who had come out to enjoy the sunny evening were taken by the blast and buried under the falling debris. The explosion had been…

The Maverick: George Weidenfeld and the Golden Age of Publishing By Thomas Harding Weidenfeld & Nicolson £25 ‘If you don't f***ing well deliver your typescript by Tuesday, I'll come and prise it from you with my teeth.’ Oh, the halcyon days of British publishing. This was the late Carmen Callil, of Virago and Chatto, seething with rage and tapping out a letter to me on her typewriter when my first book failed to materialise as expected in the late 1980s. Kingsley Amis once wrote that if a publisher can be called a genius – a notion he considered distinctly ‘uncertain’ – then his own former publisher Victor Gollancz could certainly be counted as one. Drawing up a list of publishing ‘geniuses’, one might also place on it the names of Allen…

I've been watching Alistair Petrie for some time now. It's easy to do because he's tall and ginger with a face you can – but should never – trust. He specialises in minor characters who are also slimeballs. He played James Goldsmith in the superb TV movie Lucan and Sandy Langbourne in The Night Manager. He appears in various episodes of Midsomer Murders, Sherlock, Vera and Undercover. It's always fun when Petrie pops up in a scene because he has a menacing energy but he's not, until now, been given the leg room to stretch himself into the role of a major slimeball. In The Following Events are Based on a Pack of Lies (BBC 1), written and created by sibling writing duo Penelope and Ginny Skinner, Petrie plays a…

Dovecot Studios, Edinburgh, to 6th January 2024 A JOURNEY SHARED, BLACKADDER AND HOUSTON Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, to 12th September ‘Challenging perceptions’ must be the most time-expired cliché in the curatorial lexicon. In general, it means challenging opinions that no one, other than exhibition organisers, has held for ages. In the context of this show, the battle has been fought since the Glasgow Society of Lady (Women since 1975) Artists was launched more than 140 years ago. From the early 1900s, women have played a major role in Scottish art. So the subtitle does little for this otherwise admirable exhibition. It follows the publication of Scottish Women Artists (Fleming Collection, £9.95) by Charlotte Rosteck, who is doing such impressive work with the Dumfries House and Dalkeith Palace projects. The first…

Fermentation is just what the doctor orders – a touch of the home-grown bubble and belch that not only tastes good but does you good. That makes fizz-expert James Read's Of Cabbages and Kimchi a natural for the first-aid kit, as well as the kitchen. A neat little how-to, subtitled A Practical Guide to the World of Fermented Food, it provides the low-down on what really happens when matter meets microbe. Fermentation is akin to pre-digestion, which makes foodstuffs more friendly to the human gut. That's why yoghurt is much more digestible than milk. First-hand experience underpins the science, while practical recipes include what to do when things get out of hand. Chapter headings – Sauerkraut, Kimchi, Soy Sauce, Kefir, Kvass, Kombucha – indicate that this is not a conventional…

During football's ever-shortening summer recess, Manchester United's under-21 side played Wrexham in a friendly at the Snapdragon Stadium in San Diego. This may have seemed the very definition of a pointless exercise, but an astonishing 35,000 people turned up to watch the game unfold. And here's the extraordinary thing: the overwhelming majority weren't there to support English football's most storied club (albeit a junior version). They were there to watch Wrexham, an outfit that for the past 14 seasons has languished in the fifth tier of the game. And they weren't just expat Welshmen holidaying in California. Thousands of them were Americans, drawn to watch the side at the centre of one of the most interesting experiments in sport. And how thrilled they were to see their adopted team win…

When Tom Cruise's character in the new Mission Impossible film offers payment in cryptocurrency, it's time to take a closer look at this little-understood phenomenon that exists only in the ether. Crypto (for short) was created as a way of making payments securely without using banks. It is a digital currency, not a physical one, although some people have produced physical coins or tokens for fun or as collectibles. Crypto has also gained recognition through sponsorships with Premier League football clubs, which used to be done by the alcohol, tobacco and, not for much longer, gambling industries. In contrast to traditional payment systems, crypto is not usually backed by any tangible assets such as sterling or gold, though a few, called stablecoins, link to stable assets such as the US…

Ask Virginia Frenemy from Hell Q We've been friends for a long time with a woman who refers to my wife and I as ‘the only family I've got’, even though we're not related. Recently, however, she's become manipulative and although most of the time she is sweet, on these occasions she rings us weeping saying we're neglecting her and that she wants to kill herself. My wife has become so stressed with reassuring her that she's now on antidepressants herself. I really resent this friend for starting to ruin our lives. Name and address supplied A Dog trainers always recommend that to train a dog that barks inappropriately, you ignore them when they bark and reward them with a treat when they're quiet. Try this method out on your friend…

Missing vole delays bridge opening Eastern Daily Press Woman was sent to steal man's doormat – and nobody knows why Stoke-on-Trent Live High street takeaway to close for two weeks Sheerness Times Guardian £15 for published contributions NEXT ISSUE The October issue is on sale on 20th September 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…

WHO WERE the Peculiar People? The Peculiar People were a Christian group founded by James Banyard in Rochford, Essex, in 1838. Banyard, the impoverished son of a ploughman, was born in the town in January 1800. He became a dissolute youth with a reputation for drunkenness. He was later jailed for petty acts of smuggling and poaching. He married his first wife, Susan Garnish, in 1823. His drunkenness worsened and culminated in him losing his money and, it is said, most of his clothes at a fair. Susan demanded that he change his ways or she would leave him. So he started to attend a Wesleyan Chapel in Rochford. It is believed he soon ‘saw the light’, became a teetotaller and even preached on occasions. In 1837, Banyard became friendly…

Aalst n. One who changes their name to be nearer the front. Ahenny adj. The way people stand when examining other people's bookshelves. Albacete n. A single, surprisingly long hair growing in the middle of nowhere. Articlave n. A clever architectural construction designed to give the illusion from the top deck of a bus that it is far too big for the road. Berriwillock n. An unknown workmate who writes ‘All the best’ on your leaving card. Fulking vb. Pretending not to be in when the carol singers come round. Grimbister n. Large body of cars on a motorway all travelling at exactly the speed limit because one of them is a police car. Harmanger n. The person who takes the blame while the manager you demanded to see hides in his office. Kentucky adj. Fitting exactly and satisfyingly.…

Spontaneity can be wonderful. Several years ago, I was at Deauville Races on a glorious Normandy summer's day. Despite hours of homework, my selections had all failed to cross the winning line anywhere near the front. In the last race, I had ten euros left and decided on the spur of the moment to throw caution to the wind. I picked four horses at random to finish in the correct order in the first four places – a real long shot. To my astonishment, it came off. My wife and I enjoyed a splendid dinner at Deauville's finest restaurant that evening. In more than 50 years of backing horses this was, sadly, a unique experience. Some of the most memorable moments in sport have originated in a single, spontaneous piece…

In one of the best smoking scenes in English literature, Charles Ryder and Julia Flyte are motoring to Brideshead. Julia is behind the wheel of her open-topped car and nods towards a box of cigarettes: ‘Light one for me, will you?’ ‘As I took the cigarette from my lips and put it in hers,’ writes Charles, ‘I caught a thin bat's squeak of sexuality, inaudible to any but me.’ But, of course, we all heard it. Imagine for a moment that, instead of lighting her cigarette, Charles had offered Lady Julia a pull on his vape. Things would have turned out so very differently. Why? Because vaping can never be cool. Smoking, on the other hand … Smoking, for all we know about it today, used to have a place…

Oldie Man of Letters The silly donkeys at Coutts got their just deserts in the Nigel Farage affair. A few grossly overpaid execs stood down, and they will no doubt move on to even more overpaid positions. The irrepressibly perky Farage will feel he has won a great victory for freedom of expression and freedom of thought. But he hasn't really. Someone who got much less publicity than Farage was the Rev Richard Fothergill, 62, who had been investing his modest savings with the Yorkshire Building Society for 17 years. In the modern way, the building society asked their clients for ‘feedback’. Mr Fothergill, being a conscientious chap, provided some. It was ‘Pride’ month, and this conservative-minded clergyman said he did not agree with the building society's relentless promotion of…

Country Mouse How long will it be before overweight airline customers like me will be weighed along with their luggage and compelled to pay for two seats on budget airlines? The sardine-can-like conditions of my short-haul aisle seat from Klagenfurt to Stansted seemed worse than usual, owing to my recent fondness for breakfast croissants with black-cherry compote, a balm in troubled times. It meant, as part of a cohort of other overweight Britons, that I hardly had room to fold down my tray for my warm gin and tonic without ice. There wasn't any of the latter on our ‘no frills’, two-hours-delayed night fright. Or have I spelt that wrong? My editor was sat – to use common parlance – on the opposite aisle seat and, being taller than the…

SISTER TERESA Our monastery is fortunate in having a meticulous bursar. Her grasp of the complexities of our finances never fails to impress our professional advisers. As with all Carmelites, hers is a life of sacrifice. She would far rather be out in the garden, whatever the weather, coaxing the plants she has taken under her care, as opposed to battling with the accounts. Keen on wilding and with green fingers, she is at her happiest planting, transplanting and, very occasionally, weeding. As far as she is concerned, very few plants are weeds at all, though ground elder occasionally goes too far, even for her. There is an eccentric quality about the way she plants. She is squirrel-like in that she will sow seeds in the ground, forget where she…

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 Edwardian Liverpool St SIR: We East Anglians are justifiably alarmed at the prospect of losing beloved Liverpool Street Station (August issue). My father enjoyed recounting the tale of his mother's gardener and two village worthies who ventured ‘up Lunnun’ in the early 1900s. They biked to Ipswich station to catch the early train and on their return to the pub that evening a crowd gathered, eager to know what ‘Lunnun’ was like. In those days, few people travelled far from their village. Well, they said, there were hundreds of folks, some in a hurry, some just walking about and others sitting on benches. There were a lot of shops, a florist,…

You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid, I would hardly be a human being. Evelyn Waugh in a letter to Nancy Mitford, who had been shocked at his unkindness to a young fan I was in the Virgin Islands once. I met a girl. We ate lobster, drank piña coladas. At sunset, we made love like sea otters. That was a pretty good day! Why couldn't I get that day, over and over? Bill Murray in Groundhog Day (1993) Four be the things I'd be better without: Love, curiosity, freckles and doubt. Dorothy Parker, Inventory God may pardon you but I never can. Elizabeth I to the dying Countess of Nottingham All the inspiration I ever needed was…

My friend Mossy is the most objectionable man in the West Country. He settled – for want of a better word – in Bath in the Seventies before exiling himself to Frome 15 years ago because Bath ‘was too full of idiots’. His actual word was riper but he found himself among yet more idiots in Frome, as he was at pains to observe. Publicly. Consequently, he was barred from his local boozer, the 15th-century Three Swans. So he bought it. He now has a begrudgingly grateful clientele, happy in the knowledge a) they won't ever be as miserable as he is, and b) he will ensure his beer is the cheapest in town. It's very definitely a wet pub, apart from bacon sarnies for Saturday lunch. Despite being a…

It stands for Build Your Dreams. Not a promising start, especially as some of its models have Build Your Dreams written across the boot-lid. Almost as unpromising is a model range which includes names such as Seal, Dolphin, Han, Tang and Seagull. But we'll hear and see a lot more of them soon. BYD is no minnow start-up. Last year, it was the world's largest manufacturer of plug-in cars – 1.85 million – employing 600,000 globally with 28,000 patents registered. And it's not just cars – it does solar panels, fork-lifts, trains and much else. It's the second-largest producer of high-voltage vehicle batteries, it makes the batteries for the Tesla Model Y and there's a one-in-five chance that it made your phone battery. It can produce, in-house, almost every component…

Is there something you really miss when you're away? English newspapers which I can read online but I prefer holding the big thing – and walking the dog. What's your favourite destination? Sydney. Jesus Christ Superstar coincided with an Australia-West Indies Test match. It was a sell-out. I rang my blunt Aussie friend Bob Radford, and asked him to Superstar. He said, ‘No, I've heard it's a f***ing awful show.’ He added, ‘Want to come to the Test tomorrow?’ What are your earliest childhood holiday memories? Mudeford in the Fifties. We never went abroad until I was about 16, when my dad got a station wagon. Did you write poems when you were little? I wrote funny poems. One was about ‘Sweets coming off the ration/ Just like the pre-war fashion./ Crowds…