Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2023 i The Oldie

Grumpy Oldie Man This is absolutely the last thing a writer on nodding terms with sanity would admit to in print. If the editor has any residual professional pride, he'll start the trenchant sacking letter on reading the next sentence. But I cannot find the words. I can, not to brag, find some words. However, the adequate words for a certain Mike van Erp remain beyond location. I've been searching fruitlessly for them for about a month, since reading about him in the Sunday Times. Every time I think about him (and I've thought about little else), a peasouper of psychotic rage descends to blind whatever bit of the mind's eye peruses the frontal lobe for mots justes. What follows, to spell out the preemptive apology, is guaranteed to be…

In the early Seventies, little girls fresh from stage school were thick on the ground. They were common as daisies in a field and regularly picked off and handed round the studios like sweets. I was a convent girl and that had an even wider appeal. One in the eye for the nuns – and somehow more challenging. If this sounds cynical, it also happens to be true. But among the dross there were some very decent and respectful souls. It was learning how to distinguish them. The occasional big star would procure girls via their agents or management. Producers would be more direct and could make life unbearable for an actress unless she played footsie. But force was rare and most ingénues knew that complying could lead to fame…

I t's almost 50 years since I became Twiggy's first ghostwriter. Of course it was Justin who brokered the deal. Justin de Villeneuve (né Nigel John Davies from Edmonton) was no longer her Svengali/boyfriend, but he was still running ‘Twiggy Enterprises’. Her autobiography would be a slim volume, we joked. All royalties would go to Twiggy Enterprises (sadly for me, as the book, Twiggy by Twiggy, 1975, did rather well). She was three years younger than me and three stone lighter. We knew the same London suburbs, we'd bought the same black, lace-trimmed frock at Biba in 1964 (for £3), when I was doing A-levels and she was at the Fender Club in Harrow in her Mod gear: Hush Puppies, white lipstick, kohl-rimmed eyes. One day, Justin took her to…

Fifty years ago this October, Londoners were woken at 6am by the amiable tones of the journalist David Jessel welcoming them to Britain's first commercial news station, LBC. These days, of course, it has a roster of well-known names and claims more than three million weekly listeners. But, in those early weeks and months in 1973, the London Broadcasting Company was wonderfully odd and chaotic. Jessel was followed on air by Janet Street-Porter and Paul Callan who hosted a chat show called Two in the Morning! – the exclamation mark was included in its title. Other presenters of the 24-hour operation would include Bel Mooney, Jeremy Beadle, Peter Allen and Carol Barnes. One of the new recruits was a long-haired young chap called Jon Snow. Panic reigned. Tears flowed. During…

History What happened on Alderney during the war? A government ‘Review into the number of prisoners who died on Alderney during the Nazi occupation’ has been greeted with headlines about ‘Britain's Holocaust Island’ – allegations of cover-up and conspiracy, and counterarguments that outsiders are making trouble for no good reason. Eric Pickles, the Conservative peer and former government minister who announced the inquiry, has even been accused of ‘wokeism’, which must be a new one for him. His team of 11 experts, led by Paul Sanders, an academic historian based in France, is due to report in March next year. The inquiry will be taking public submissions of ‘evidence, files, or calculations of the number of the dead’ until November. We have long known that, when the Channel Islands were…

Postcards from the Edge There's been a countrywide campaign to keep local railway ticket offices staffed by human personnel – after the government recommended widespread automation. The online petition to retain ticket staff is open until 18th October (petition.parliament.uk/petitions/636542). If it attracts 100,000 signatures, the matter will be debated in parliament. Ticket offices with real staff are cherished by oldies, especially if rail journeys are complicated. At Walmer, near Deal, the ticket office is such a model of perfection that it has entered into local legend, along with the lady who runs it, Debbie Brooker. Debbie, maternal but glamorous, has been running the Walmer ticket office for 34 years. She cleans it, decorates it with flowers and plants, and maintains a small collection of free books and puzzles for travellers.…

Sophia Waugh: School Days Results day, and I am staying with a friend in Sicily. I've been idling in the baking sun, watching multi-hued butterflies nosedive into the oleanders, and rescuing lizards from the pool. But always, at the back of my mind, results are looming. My friend has a daughter waiting for her results, too. So, every now and again, we go into a bit of a mini-spin in anticipation of the worst. We both have nightmares – she of her daughter failing everything, me of my class passing everything but English literature. There is champagne waiting for the evening – we wait to see whether it will be for commiseration or celebration. Messages come from my department saying who will be going into school on the day, who…

I was working in Kuwait when Iraq invaded the country on 2nd August 1990. My wife and two young children were bussed out by the British Embassy while I remained in hiding. I lived in a villa and had some Sri Lankans sheltering in my servants’ quarters as they had been kicked out by their Kuwaiti employers. One morning, one of them came to warn me Iraqi soldiers were searching houses for resistance fighters. They advised me to dress in Kuwaiti clothes and hide in a mosque, pretending to read the Koran. In the mosque, I sat down in an empty room. It was hot but I found the switch for a fan and was dozing off when I was woken by the call to prayer. I was in a room…

Texts on TV There is a trend in TV dramas which is beyond irritating: we're expected to read messages on phones to understand the plot. The trouble is that I can't read the text – it's just too small. It's not my fault; my eyesight is fine, we have the largest television we have ever owned (29 inches wide) and we certainly don't want anything bigger. The TV producers clearly believe that we either have one of those huge screens you see in pubs or that we sit awfully close. However, like normal people, we sit on the other side of the room and, before you suggest we live in Downton Abbey, we are only about ten feet away. I can't believe I am alone in this. In fact, I know I'm…

Ofcom is the quango that tries to regulate broadband, phone services and the post, as well as, in its own words, ‘keeping an eye on TV and radio’. It has an annual budget heading towards £200m and employs more than 1,000 souls. That sounds fine, and I'd be glad if someone were keeping broadcasters in line. But, as it's an impossible task, I rather question the point of Ofcom, at least as a regulator of content. It was established in 2003, so I doubt it expected streaming services to become so dominant. Very few of us did. As a consequence, Ofcom's reach into the online world is pretty modest. It does not regulate Netflix (because its European headquarters is based in the Netherlands) despite 17 million UK households subscribing to…

Among colloquial names for the common redshank (Tringa totanus) are ‘watchdog’, ‘yelper’ and ‘warden of the marshes’. The first bird to fly off piping your presence, as conspicuous as it is noisy with its white rump and white-edged wings, will be a redshank: With strong smooth strokes deliberate, Flicker along the low wet meads… Beneath skies coldly blue As their sweet ‘Tiew-heu!’ From Redshanks by Anthony Rye Such innate anxiety is evident from the carefully designed nest. Normally this is in a grass tuft with the taller stems bent to form a delicately concealing roof. Both parents incubate and, when one leaves, the protective grasses veil the entrance. Often a prepared corridor ensures the bird does not break cover until a safe distance from the eggs or chicks. Despite this,…

In 50 years of play, I can't recall a deal to beat this month's – randomly dealt for one of my Advanced BridgeCasts. Dealer South North-South Vulnerable The bidding Six Clubs would make easily on the knave of spades lead round to the ace-queen. It cannot be made on a trump or unlikely heart lead. But West's natural lead is the king of diamonds and here is where it gets really fascinating. Win dummy's ace of diamonds (throwing the seven of spades) and ruff a diamond, exhausting East of diamonds. Now run all your clubs. Extraordinarily, you must keep dummy's four of hearts, so that West's last four cards are ♠ K J and ♦ Q J, while dummy's last four cards are ♥ K Q 4 and ♦10. East,…

From the war in Ukraine to wildfires around the world and a summer of industrial strife at home, reasons to be cheerful have not been much in evidence. In an effort to make sense of some of our woes and to lift our spirits, we've assessed the literature on offer and its potential to help us understand what is happening in our world. Russia expert Victor Sebestyen has considered some of the best titles to emerge from the tragedy of Ukraine. From the musings of historians to the plight of the country's civilians and the soldiers on the frontline, we can better understand what life is like for Ukrainians - and even for the Russian soldiers, many of whom would prefer not to be fighting this war. On the home…

WHAT ABOUT MEN? CAITLIN MORAN Ebury Press, 320pp, £22 Two weeks before her book came out, Caitlin Moran had to close down her ‘mentions’ on her Twitter account because it was becoming ‘genuinely unpleasant’. ‘Men, it seemed,’ she wrote in her Times column, ‘were very, very angry about the whole idea of the book.’ The Observer’s Rhik Samadder, however, thought it ‘screamingly funny, boldly against the grain and socially urgent’. He posed the question: ‘Is it harder to be a man than a woman these days?’ He found Moran's answer of yes surprising. ‘Her chapters take in men's bodies, conversational style, sexual imagination, quest for status, models for ageing. She runs fearlessly towards contemporary male pressures…. She takes them seriously, in place of ridicule or disgust. The effect is liberating,…

Following the announcement of this year's Booker Prize shortlist (just too late, alas, for this edition of the Oldie) we fearlessly predict that Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry, (Faber, 272pp, £16.99) the story of a retired policeman looking back at his life, will make the cut. ‘’Nobody writes like, nobody takes risks like, nobody pushes the language, and the heart, and the two together, quite like Sebastian Barry.’ writes Ali Smith. We're equally optimistic for Nigerian author Ayobami Adebayo whose A Spell of Good Things (Canongate, 352pp, £18.99) is described by the judges as ‘a powerful and staggering read about class and desire in modern day Nigeria’. But as we all know the Booker has ways of confounding our expectations. Remember The Bone People, Keri Hulme's 1985 winner which…

Boyfriend threw a remote control at television Dundee Courier & Advertiser Parish council won't pay £2k to keep toilets open The Journal (formerly known as The Newcastle Journal) Farm gate goes viral Western Telegraph, Pembrokeshire £15 for published contributions NEXT ISSUE The November issue is on sale on 18th October 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…

The dawn of the modern bicycle age at the end of the 19th century ushered in a moral panic among the guardians of public virtue. Some doctors warned that using the contraption could lead to a medical condition they dubbed ‘bicycle face’. ‘Over-exertion, the upright [and immodest] position on the wheel, and the unconscious effort to maintain one's balance tend to produce a wearied and exhausted “bicycle face”,’ reported the Literary Digest in 1895. It went on to describe the condition: ‘usually flushed, but sometimes pale, often with lips more or less drawn, and the beginning of dark shadows under the eyes, and always with an expression of weariness’. Elsewhere, others said the condition was ‘characterised by a hard, clenched jaw and bulging eyes’, which was of course most unfeminine.…

One chief of British Intelligence described James Bond as ‘the best recruiting sergeant in the world’. Another former head of MI6, Richard Dearlove, agrees that the fictional spy's impact has been huge: ‘Definitely, it's had a positive effect. It's made the Service the most famous intelligence organisation. ‘There is no linking or reality at all, but that's not really the point. It's reputational, it's myth-building, it's contributed to the brand. In the most distant part of the world, everyone has heard of MI6. There are big espionage cases, not just walk-ins like Oleg Gordievsky and Vasili Mitrokhin, where people have gone to the British when it would be more logical to approach the Americans, and who particularly like the British because of the Bond culture.’ This is more than borne…

On 16th September, the Anthony Powell Society revealed a blue plaque on the writer's home at 1 Chester Gate, just off Regent's Park. My father, the writer Ferdinand Mount, Anthony Powell's nephew, said a few words. Also there was his elder son, the film director Tristram Powell. His younger son, John Powell, is Patron of the Society. Powell (1905-2000) and his wife, Lady Violet Powell, lived at the house from 1937 to 1952. There Powell began his 12-novel sequence, A Dance to the Music of Time. And it was there in 1949 that the Powells’ niece, Lady Antonia Fraser, then 17, came to lodge. Antonia, now 91, was also at the ceremony at her old home. She moved there from Hampstead Garden Suburb, where her parents, Frank and Elizabeth Pakenham…

Nostalgia always frightened me. It was something that sounded like an age-related condition, such as myalgia or angina. Sufferers always smelled of Deep Heat, ordered chips by the penn'orth and let the pounds look after themselves. They were full of waste-notwant-not wisdom, and I knew that could never happen to me. My fear of nostalgia began as a young boy in the 1970s with dreary afternoons enduring the ITV show Looks Familiar, where the likes of Denis Norden and Arthur Askey discussed silent films and music hall acts. All their talk of olden times was irrelevant to me. And if these were the good old days, why was everything black and white? And can I switch over to Grange Hill? I recall queueing in the local newsagent to pay for…

Town Mouse As a mouse in the city, I have a mixture of pity and admiration for animals used for entertainment and spectacle. In Shakespeare's day, it was considered a great day out for all the family to watch bears, bulls and dogs goring each other to death in an arena. Bear-baiting took place at one of a number of so-called gardens around today's South Bank, just outside the walls of the city, and therefore outside its jurisdiction. According to historian Matthew Green, this was the most popular spectator sport in London. In the case of bull-baiting, the crowds would see a bull tethered to a stake driven into the ground in the centre of the arena. The crowd, says Green, would start screaming ‘Go, bull. Go, dog!’ A volley…

Mary Killen's Beauty Tips Long eyelashes have been a symbol of beauty since records began. It's almost a Golden Ratio thing. Long eyelashes create a contrast between the eye and the eyelid, making eyes visibly larger and thus more attractive. Biologically, eyelashes protect eyes from debris and other air particles. So, the longer ones have a health function, too. I had never heard about eyelash trimming. Surely everyone wants their eyelashes to be as long and thick as plausibly possible? Yet it crops up in Love From Venice, a forthcoming mini-masterpiece of a memoir by Gill Johnson (sister of wine writer Hugh), the nonagenarian author. She describes how an impulse visit to Universal Aunts, the upmarket staff bureau, in 1957 landed her a job as governess to two exquisite boys.…

Criminal damage is one of my least favourite crimes. And, if events in Harlow, Essex, on 13th April of this year are anything to go by, I am not alone. Carly Burd, an allotment gardener, had been using her plot to grow organic fruit and vegetables to give to neighbours unable to afford ever-rising food prices. Her garden was salted by vandals, making it unfit for growing anything. Within days, she had received some £250,000 in donations. So a wrong was triumphantly righted. This horrible salt retribution was used by the ancient Romans where they had conquered to ensure their enemies would not be able to cultivate their land. It is now a war crime. Recently I spent a week near Salisbury on my annual holiday. As we were about…

The drastic rise in motor premiums this year is shocking everyone when they come to renew their insurance policies. Renewal quotes are so high that even the most dilatory among us are comparing prices. But only a few people will be looking at telematics insurance. These policies involve installing trackers in the car to monitor how well it is driven. The safer the driving, the less is paid. Though originally devised for youngsters, and some insurers still sell only to the inexperienced, older motorists can also benefit from proving they are good drivers. The different insurers use a variety of methods to track driving, including black boxes installed in the car, small plug-in ones, mobile phone apps, and a device, or ‘tag’, that sticks on the windscreen. Sensors then track…

Taking a Walk The night before this stroll, I stayed in an ancient Woodstock coaching inn, busy with foreign tourists whose presence gave me an outsider's view of the strangeness and wonder of England. Church bells pealed shortly before 11am on a late-summer Sunday as an old market town idyll played out: immaculate but modest Georgian houses opening on to pavements where locals and their dogs chatted beneath old lamps and walls of honeyed stone. Even so, entering Blenheim Palace by the back door – a triumphal arch built by Nicholas Hawksmoor in 1723 at the request of the 1st Duke of Marlborough's widow who, according to a hint of admonishment in the inscription, took charge of ‘the many things that remained unfinished’ after his death – was a jawdropping…

IN COMPETITION No 297 you were invited to write a poem called Bells. Gail White concluded with a firm couplet: ‘We keep that memory with us like a shield / Against despair: the bells of Finchingfield.’ Other Essex bells inspired Christine Ratcliff. Bob Morrow had ‘one regret: no one to tell / I've heard the Callart Bell’. Martin Brown was resolutely downbeat: ‘No ambulance bell, a siren instead, / Fast but late; he was already dead.’ Commiserations to them and to Anne Bond, Rosemary Lindsay, G M Southgate, Greta Newton, Katie Mallett and D A Prince. Congratulations to those printed below, each of whom win £25, with The Chambers Dictionary going to Ann Hilton. She woke to the day's importance, expectant of the sound of the bell. She ate her…

A THREAD OF VIOLENCE A STORY OF TRUTH, INVENTION AND MURDER MARK O'CONNELL Granta, 288pp, £16.99 Reviewers were unanimous: this true-crime book was outstanding, surpassing its genre limits. Rob Doyle in the Guardian called it something new and dizzying, Borgesian’. O'Connell, he was delighted to discover, had not settled for being a reporter but had become an artist. The key term all said readers had to understand was ‘gubu’, coined when the Irish Prme Minister, Charles Haughey described Malcom Macarthur's two murders in 1982 as ‘grotesque, unbelievable’, ‘bizarre’ and ‘unprecedented’. Haughey's government would eventually be brought down by his association with Macarthur, an extravagant Dublin flaneur who had planned a bank raid to prop up his ailing finances during which he brutally murdered two young people. ‘He was a mash-up…

Millions of people live with infirmity. Very few of them have the skill to write cogently about how they cope. Andrew Leland fits this bill. So too does Sylvia Patterson. Both are distinguished journalists. And both face an uncertain future. Leland has retinitis pigmentosa, a hereditary condition that eventually results in total blindness. Patterson is in remission from an aggressive type of breast cancer that required months of chemotherapy, one of the side effects of which is acute constipation, described by her in excruciating detail. Most of Leland and Patterson's readers will, I imagine, thank their lucky stars. But that's hardly a reason to buy books like these. At the very least, you hope to learn something. For instance in The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End…

RIVER OF THE GODS GENIUS, COURAGE AND BETRAYAL IN THE SEARCH FOR THE SOURCE OF THE NILE CANDICE MILLARD Swift,349pp,£18.99 Richard Burton and John Hanning Speke, the rival Victorian explorers who sought the origin of the Nile, were both intensely driven characters. Burton disguised himself as a Muslim, even getting circumcised, in order to be the first Englishman to enter Mecca, while Speke had a thing for shooting pregnant animals and eating their foetuses. Their first expedition ended with both men being attacked by Somalis and sustaining terrible injuries. The success of their second expedition depended on Sidi Mubarak Bombay, a freed African slave who accompanied them. Burton claimed that Lake Tanganyika was the source, but Speke said it was Lake Victoria. He ‘was eventually proved right,’ wrote Gerard DeGroot…

Gyles Brandreth's Diary Are you into podcasts? I am in a big way, but a lot of other oldies aren't. I even have friends who pretend not to know what a podcast is. ‘Radio 4 is good enough for me,’ they say. And, yes, Radio 4 is indeed glorious. I have just been recording another couple of episodes of Just a Minute (a Radio 4 staple since 1967), and, with Sue Perkins now happily at the helm, I think the show is as fun and funny as ever. Same goes for The Archers – a radio favourite since 1951. With The Archers, of course, you get a lot more sex than you do with Just a Minute. From Ambridge the other day, we were treated to the radio soap's firstever…

In our day, you were cheating if you were caught red-handed in bed with the wrong person. Nowadays, cheating is far more nuanced, with layers of tiny betrayals or ‘micro-cheats’. Young people connect online, often by liking someone's Instagram photograph or TikTok post, as well as responding to Snapchat messages. Yet if you have declared you are committed to someone, those actions are then deemed microcheats – and you'll know immediately if it's happening to you. If you are following your beloved's social media profile online – which you are certain to be – you can see instantly if his or her number of followers or friends has increased. You can quickly ascertain who the new friend is – and woe betide your beloved if it's a good-looking person. That…

On the last morning of the summer term at the all-girls St Margaret's School, Bushey, in the 1950s, the deputy headmistress would walk each leaver, one by one, up the aisle of the school chapel at the final assembly. This was a rehearsal for their fathers walking them up the aisle of a church, which it was expected they soon would. Marriage was their hoped-for imminent destination. But what did Britain's daughters do between the final assembly and the day of meeting Mr Right? Did they master any new skills? Did they earn any money? These were my questions, in writing Jobs for the Girls: How We Set Out to Work in the Typewriter Age. I used to be good at guessing at first glance whether a woman had been…

Bellerby & Co, the only bespoke globemaker in existence, has won the Queen's Award for Enterprise twice. The founder, Peter Bellerby, began the business in 2010 after failing to find a special globe for his father's 80th birthday. Today, his company makes terrestrial, celestial and planetary globes for customers around the world. And now he's written a book to celebrate the world of globe-making. The Globemakers: The Curious Story of an Ancient Craft (Bloomsbury, £25) by Peter Bellerby is out now…

The 9th of September marked the 80th anniversary of Operation Avalanche, the Allied landings in Italy near Salerno. My father, Christopher Oldfield (1921-81), fought in the Italian Campaign. He had two years at Oxford before joining the Grenadier Guards in 1942. In 1943, he was sent with his battalion, the Sixth, to North Africa and thereafter to Italy. He was wounded twice, once in North Africa and once in Italy. During lockdown, I found in tin boxes half a dozen exercise books full of the poems, essays and short stories he wrote, all in pencil, while at war, and the letters he sent to his aunt. He was very close to her, both his parents being dead. He wrote to her, ‘I can tell you nothing of where I am…

Oldie Man of Letters It's hard to tell whether my addiction to A Dance to the Music of Time is something to worry about. Is it a bit like spending too much time at one's club, when a more adventurous approach to social life might introduce me to ‘new people’? (‘Dread phrase’, as Wallace Arnold might have said.) Probably. But one of the pleasures of old age is that you no longer feel shame at basking in the familiar. Open any volume of Dance and you know you will not be disappointed. Every now and then I reread a volume of Proust to remind me that Powell is not really in the same league as the long roman fleuve to which Dance is, in a sense, a tribute. But, in…

Country Mouse Thanks to the miracle of tech, my wife can send me regular updates of her participation in a house party in a fishing lodge in Scotland. Amazingly, not just photographs but short film clips are transmitted almost in real time, showing what my father referred to as ‘Piccadilly Highlanders’. I was instantaneously transported from the dank and silent cottage into a drawing room with tartan sofas, a crackling log fire, and full ashtrays, along with occasional tables with glasses quivering from heavy nearby footfall. No kilts, but a large mixed gathering of old and young was cavorting, capering, and whooping to the deafening soundtrack of whining bagpipes. In the past, I might have spotted myself lurking at the back of the room, looking shifty, my lips set in…

Tom Stacey, writer, foreign correspondent and publisher, was remembered at a service at St John the Baptist church in Holland Road, Kensington. In the Daily Telegraph’s obituary, Peregrine Worsthorne, the late Sunday Telegraph editor, called him ‘the very embodiment of that genre of wild-card journalist: at once archaic and conventional; subversive and patriotic; seedy and stylish’. Xan Smiley, editor-at-large at the Economist, gave the eulogy: ‘His career was quite astonishing in its range and diversity, in the old sense of the word. He roamed the world as a star reporter for top newspapers, interviewing Salvador Allende, Chiang Kai-shek, Indira Ghandi, Nikita Khrushchev, you name it. He made friends with Idi Amin in exile. ‘Politically, Tom was hard to pin down or put in a box: he was right-wing in most…

In 1992, I was invited to the Chichester Festival Theatre to perform in a production of Venus Observed by Christopher Fry (1907-2005). It was my first theatre job. Not only was it at Chichester, but it boasted a starry cast led by the late, great Sir Donald Sinden. The actor, who died in 2014 at 90, would have been 100 on 9th October this year. My part was relatively minor and insignificant, but I had a nice bit towards the end, and I thought I might be able to make something of it. Rehearsals were a pleasure, attended by the author himself and helmed by our director, the sadly recently departed James Roose-Evans. Donald was immaculate and attended rehearsals every day in suit and tie and highly polished shoes. Nothing…

I try to make each day a miniature lifetime, in which I achieve something and I enjoy something. Leslie Bricusse I didn't know we had ever quarrelled. Henry Thoreau on being asked, when dying, if he'd made his peace with God The how-many-eth dinner did that make this winter? And no end in sight! How could Pauline stand it? Why did she want to stand it? Edith Wharton on dinner parties, Twilight Sleep Her collection was comprised largely of mainstream choices that reflected – whether popular or classical – not so much an individual spirit as the generic tastes of her times. Claire Messud, The Emperor's Children The requirements for success in the service were not endeavour, nor work, valour or perseverance, but simply the faculty of getting on with…

GFollowing the great response to Insider's Travel's trip to northern Spain, we have devised a bespoke tour of Portugal, using its great local knowledge and contacts. We will be based in Braga and Coimbra. We start in Braga, exploring the north, including the original capital of Guimarães, the coastal Viana do Castelo and Ponte de Lima. After a day in the Douro Valley, we change our base to the old university town of Coimbra. From here, it's leitão suckling pig, a medieval arboretum and some of the world's largest waves, not to mention treasures of the Romanesque. All accompanied by excellent Portuguese cuisine and wines. Wednesday 9th October Arrival in Porto Fly to Porto. Check in at the 4* Vila Gale Porto (www.vilagale.com) in Braga. We take in the Archbishop's…

Ask Virginia 80th birthday girl Q I shall be 80 next year and I keep dithering about what to do to celebrate it. My daughter suggests having a giant party for everyone I know – while my son is suggesting a quiet dinner at a local restaurant with just our close family. My younger sister suggests a sit-down meal for 50 at a local restaurant, and my brother says I shouldn't do anything – just forget about it. Do you have any ideas? ‘Veryoldie’, by email A Obviously if you're happy to forget it, then don't bother. But it sounds as if you'd like some acknowledgement of such a big anniversary. My own plan, just to confuse you further, is to have three parties. One for all my relations. Name tags…

SHADOWS AT NOON THE SOUTH ASIAN TWENTIETH CENTURY JOYA CHATTERJI Bodley Head, 849pp, £30 Married to Anil Seal, Chatterji is ‘one half of the power couple that has led the study of South Asian history at Cambridge for fifty years,’ wrote Oxford historian Zareer Masani in the Literary Review, and is therefore ‘well placed’ to meet the challenge of ‘writing a history of South Asia covering a period of a century and addressing everything from politics and the family to food and Bollywood films.’ Masani found Chatterji to be ‘most entertaining in the candid autobiographical vignettes she offers us of life in the upper middle-class Delhi home where she grew up, with a Brahmin Bengali father and an English mother… Although occasionally verbose and repetitive, this is a book which…

ONE MIDSUMMER'S DAY MARK COCKER Cape, 352pp, £20 Mark Cocker is one of the most acclaimed of British nature writers. In One Midsummer's Day, he takes a single day in his English garden to take the reader back to the origins of the world and the vast interconnectedness of everything. He uses as his messenger for this huge theme the remarkable swift which darts and skirls above us from April to August. In the Guardian, Katy Guest marvelled at just how extraordinary swifts are. ‘They have been recorded at altitudes of 4,400m, and travel so far in a single trip that a nesting pair feeding their chicks in southern England could be scooping up insects above Germany. They weigh just 40g but have a wingspan of 42-49cm; a human would…

Between the 1950s and the 1970s, before the internet, when children watched television for one hour a day, the defining images of the world and all its everyday wonders were found in Ladybird books. Their colourful illustrations instantly recognisable, they dispensed captivating information and ‘amaze your friends’ skills to master. Ladybirds were the background to post-war growing up. It would be hard to find anyone born before 1980 who wouldn't pounce delightedly on a battered Ladybird. The books are irresistible (and reliable) sources on everything from mothers to pond life to astronauts to birds eggs, rockpools and steam engines; from what to look for in churches and streams and gardens to how to work tractors and make crystal radio sets. But it's the pictures which make them so addictively memorable.…