Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2024 i The Oldie

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary Well done, King Charles, for making us all more prostate-aware. I have been personally prostate-conscious for many years, thanks to one of the kings of comedy, the late, great Bob Monkhouse, who died of prostate cancer, aged 75, in December 1973. Bob was a very funny man and an almost proselytising sex enthusiast. Visiting his home, I was struck by the larger-than-life-size photographs of naked glamour models adorning the walls of his basement bathroom. ‘Anyone you know?’ he quipped. ‘Not yet,’ I said, gamely. (I was quite young at the time.) ‘Have you ever been to an orgy?’ he asked. ‘No,’ I answered truthfully. ‘Orgies are fun,’ he said, ‘but quite a challenge. The awkward part is afterwards when you’re not too sure who to thank.’ Bob…

WHAT IS a Brexit tackle? A Brexit tackle is a tackle so emphatic that it takes an opponent out of the game – rather in the manner that a referendum might take a nation out of a customs union. I learned the term while watching my nine-year-old son play football with his school team. ‘Brexit him!’ they would cry whenever an opponent went on a promising run. Sometimes, one of them would add, ‘Brexit means Brexit!’ And then fall about laughing. As you might imagine, this was initially a source of confusion among the middle-class Bristol parents – and I’m sure it will not shock you if I tell you that 100 per cent of us voted Remain. Had Farageism seeped undetected into the playground? Had one of their favourite…

James ‘Jimmy’ Jarché (1890-1965), my grandfather, was one of the most sought-after photojournalists of his generation. He was born to immigrant Lithuanian parents in Rotherhithe, near the docks by Tower Bridge, in 1890. Jimmy’s parents arrived in London after living in Paris for a while, where his father, Arnold, worked as an assistant in a photographic studio. In London, having set up Tower Bridge Photographic Studios, Arnold would take classic portraiture pictures during the day, but after hours his work would take a macabre turn. With no photographic unit of their own at that time, the Metropolitan Police would call on Arnold to photograph the dead bodies lifted from the Thames, assisted by Jimmy, who was then only 13. He would often be left alone with the bloated, groaning corpses…

Although not entirely forgotten, Michael ffolkes (he purposely chose the initial lower-case f) will always, it seems, have the epitaph that reads, ‘Martin Honeysett threw a cake over his head.’ This story stems from a Private Eye 21st-birthday bash, where before it got a chance to be dished out on paper plates with accompanying napkins, fellow cartoonist Honeysett threw the large and elaborately baked cake over ffolkes’s head. For ffolkes (1925-88), one of Britain’s greatest cartoonists and illustrators, that seems to be the legacy. Described as notoriously pompous and disliked by other cartoonists, he was by all accounts something of a toff and a showboater. He could be quite arrogant and patronising to other cartoonists, and was renowned for driving around London in an opentopped Rolls-Royce, smoking thick cigars. Whether…

Oldie Man of Letters My favourite moment, out of many superb moments, in Byron Rogers’s classic biography of the poet RS Thomas, is when the old curmudgeon received a letter from the Prime Minister offering him some kind of gong. The clergyman poet did not answer the letter, of course. It went straight into the waste-paper basket where it belonged. Yet many other intelligent people in Britain seem positively agog for a gong. My neighbour Jonathan Miller was a republican who had a huge range of talents – neurologist, opera producer, superb television performer. He could surely see it made him seem foolish to accept a knighthood, but he did so. He was too cool to call himself Sir Jonathan – which made the acceptance all the odder. Some intelligent…

Country Mouse My wife enquired why I have such an appetite for listening to what she calls ‘maddening’ music. It all started at Shrewsbury School in the 1970s. Our time outside lessons was our own, and one afternoon I was so utterly bored that I wandered up to my dorm and turned on the wireless. It was Radio 3 and they were playing Putnam’s Camp, a piece by the American composer Charles Ives (1874-1954). I was instantly hooked – and it started a lifelong interest in the composer whom Leonard Bernstein described as ‘a primitive’. This term is a misnomer. Ives was in fact an outsider, a businessman by day who composed – by night, or while on the train to work – music of the utmost sophistication. He anticipated…

I spent five long years at a strict Paris convent boarding school studying l’histoire de l’église. This failed to engage my attention all that time. The Middle Ages seemed interminable and monotonous, and 12 was far too young to be reading Montaigne. I had hardly given the subject any thought until Piers Paul Read’s A History of the Catholic Church recently came my way. At first, my heart sank: more of the same, 65 years on. On opening the book at random, I found a lucidity of style very far removed from its French counterpart. Also, it is packed with information and intriguing details which summon one to further investigation. With the help of the passing years, I was no longer trying to assimilate a mass of names and tiny…

My mad neighbour SIR: ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser (Old Un’s Notes, February issue) was my neighbour in a newly-built block of council flats in Duncan Street, Angel, Islington, in 1985-6. Like Adolf Hitler and like me, he had served as a Catholic altar boy, before training as a dental auxiliary. Apart from the hair, treated with monumental quantities of Grecian 2000, two vivid memories: • Black cabbies regularly dropping him off with a cheery greeting and gratis, as if he was some kind of hero. • A nasty fire in my outside dustbin shed housing the gas supply, requiring our temporary evacuation – presumably intended for Frankie, two staircases away. Happy days! Yours sincerely, Anthony Weaver, London WC2 Magic of fat fairies SIR: I am dropping you a line after seeing…

WILL HODGKINSON Lou Reed By Will Hermes Viking £25 Being abused by Lou Reed was a rite of passage for rock journalists. ‘That’s a rather pubescent question, don’t you think?’ Reed asked me in 2011, in response to what I thought was an innocuous enquiry about the influences on his old band the Velvet Underground. Two years later, just a few weeks before his death, aged 71, on 27th October 2013, I hosted an audience Q&A with Reed and the photographer Mick Rock, who captured the singer’s vampiric essence in his cover shot for the 1972 masterpiece album Transformer. This time round, he was all sweetness and light – until the fan questions came. ‘Why don’t you get the fuck out of here?’ he said to some poor soul who…

Why can’t grown-ups just give me stuff, let me do what I like and then go away A LOT? William Brown in William Again (1942) by Richmal Crompton Sadness is the matrix from which wit and irony spring; sadness is uncomfortable and creative, which is why consumer society cannot tolerate it. Germaine Greer Oh, she’s very embittered, you know. Very embittered. You’ve seen the ring she had on? Well, allegedly, that was given to her by her fiancé when she was 18, and he jilted her, and she hasn’t had it off since! Poor dear! Lurcio (played by Frankie Howerd) on Cassandra, the grumpy prophetess, in Up Pompeii! Puritanism: the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy. H L Mencken I’d like to make you laugh for about ten…

During the dark, dank days of February, a friend of mine cheers himself up by looking at the cork board on his kitchen wall. The moment the Christmas rush is over and the Hogmanay champagne is drunk, he pins his tickets to the Cheltenham Festival on the board. Just a look at them alleviates his mood. No matter how bleak and glum things are, the thought that the finest race meeting in the world is round the corner is enough to lift his spirits. And he has a point. If you have never been to the week-long extravaganza of jumps and hurdles, you may be sceptical about its therapeutic possibilities. But nothing eradicates the winter blues like heading to the edge of the Cotswolds and watching beautiful thoroughbreds tearing round…

That new electric car. Marvellous. Sepulchrally quiet around town, goes like a bat out of hell, runs on cheap juice … it could turn me into a golf-club bore overnight. Except that, like so many others, I haven’t bought one. It seems from the latest figures that the inexorable march of these vehicles is not quite so inexorable after all. Their share of new-car sales is falling, along with the second-hand values which are so important for the cost of financing a purchase. Insurance costs have shot up. Manufacturers are cutting production targets. All this is despite a full house of subsidies. While the tax on company cars has been progressively cranked up, the incentives for corporate EVs are almost irresistible. Your top-of-the-range executive Merc can cost as much as…

IN COMPETITION No 302 you were invited to write a poem called The Doormat. Most of your doormats were metaphorical, but instead of a Welcome doormat, Jenny Jones’s narrator concluded, ‘What I need’s a mat to shout: / “Go Away”, “Be Off”, “Keep Out”!’ D A Prince too ended with a memorable couplet: ‘The doormat’s silent modesty survives / The calendars of louder human lives.’ Gail White ended her tale of a doormat’s waiting game: ‘It lay supine and somnolent (to nobody’s surprise), / As dormant as a dormouse with its paws before its eyes.’ I liked the economy of a line from Dorothy Pope’s lonely narrator: ‘The fish man comes but has no time to chat.’ Commiserations to them and to Martin Brown, Katie Mallett, Noel King, Paul Holland,…

Don Black (p14) is one of Britain’s leading songwriters. He wrote Diamonds Are Forever, The Man with the Golden Gun, Thunderball and On Days Like These. He won an Oscar for Born Free. Mary Killen (p35) and Giles Wood (p41) wrote Country Life: A Story of Peaks and Troughs. She writes the Dear Mary column in the Spectator and is author of How the Queen Can Make You Happy. Professor Paul Cartledge (p53) is Professor of Greek Culture Emeritus at Cambridge University. He is author of Thebes: The Forgotten History of Ancient Greece and Alexander the Great. Clive Aslet (p55) was editor of Country Life. He wrote War Memorial and The Story of the Country House. His latest book is Sir Edwin Lutyens: Britain’s Greatest Architect?…

Grumpy Oldie Man How many people marooned in late middle age across this godforsaken planet show no signs whatever of cognitive decline? Most typically, this will manifest itself as the sporadic failure of short-term recall – although I write smugly in the abstract as one of the lucky few. My own short-term memory remains indecently perfect. How many people marooned in late middle age and beyond across… Forgive me, I find myself momentarily paralysed by an inexplicable sense of déjà vu. Anyway, there is news for anyone routinely chilled by a frisson of terror when they open the fridge door and stand there blinking in bemusement as to why. Scientists at the University of Gothenburg have invented a blood test to detect embryonic Alzheimer’s up to 15 years before it…

Writing songs is the best job in the world. I’m in heaven when I’m strolling through a park, trying to come up with an idea that hasn’t been sung about before. This involves a great amount of mind-wandering lunacy but when it happens, it is the best of all feelings. I don’t have to be in a park. I feel the same way in my kitchen with a cup of mint tea. If anyone says to me they were moved by a song of mine, I know I’ve done my job right. That said, it isn’t easy. I once compared writing lyrics to doing your own root-canal work. Stephen Sondheim called it agonising fun. It is easy to write a bad lyric, and unfortunately too many people do. I was…

My aunt was one of the original two dishevelled schoolgirls who were drawn by Ronald Searle; the other was Ronald’s sister, Olive. His drawings would eventually become ‘St Trinian’s’, but that wouldn’t happen till a few years later. Ronald Searle, the famous cartoonist, was born in Cambridge in March 1920. My aunt, Joan Hale, was born in Melbourn, a village ten miles south of Cambridge, eight months later. Ronald Searle’s sister, Olive, was born early in the following year – so they were all much of an age. Joan and Olive were best friends at the Cambridgeshire High School for Girls. They used to arrive at school all neat and tidy, and leave each day in great dishevelment, having caused mayhem in between. Ronald was studying nearby at the Cambridge…

What’s the matter with us? Why will we happily eat the shoulder of a sheep or the backside of a steer but not their livers? We nod wisely when adjured to eat ‘nose to tail’ because it’s delicious, nutritious, economical and the right thing to do. But there is almost no demand for kidneys or liver, for sweetbreads, trotters or tripe, for tongue, pig’s head, chitterlings, or even for ox heart or tail. So butchers just don’t stock them. Most offal ends up in pet food or being turned into fertiliser or fuel. It’s not the flavour we object to. It’s the thought, or maybe the sight. I will eat pretty much anything, but even I would balk at a sheep’s eye. In Malta recently, I had to close my…

Postcards from the Edge Foreign-language phrase books are a reflection of the manners and mores of past times. Until the 1980s, ‘Would you like a cigarette?’ and ‘Can I smoke in this carriage?’ were examples of how to make conversation in French, German, Italia, and so on. Then, no more. Older language guides are sometimes marked by class – evidently people who visited continental Europe used to be posher. I’ve inherited from a deceased cousin EE Patou’s French à la Mode, published in 1932, which illuminates the social position of contemporary travellers. Instructions are issued on how to conduct oneself ‘chez le grand couturier’, book tickets for the opera and interview a servant. It includes the rules for ‘the hand kiss’. ‘A Frenchman kisses the hand of a married woman…

Melvyn Bragg led the tributes to Anthony Holden, the writer and journalist, at St Martin-in-theFields. Lord Bragg’s daughter, the Rev Marie-Elsa Roche Bragg, gave the blessing and led the prayers. A glittering young star of the Sunday Times in Harold Evans’s day, Holden nearly became editor of the Times. He wrote 37 books, including biographies of Prince Charles, Princess Diana, the Queen Mother and Laurence Olivier and two books on Shakespeare. ‘At one stage, his rating as a poker player was higher than any Englishman’s rating as a tennis player,’ said Lord Bragg. ‘From there, sidestep to [his biography of] Tchaikovsky – I think his best book. He took risks in it, which proved to be valid. ‘He was immensely proud of his three boys, Ben, Joe and Sam. He…

A Georgian grandee, in plum velvet, with singularly blue eyes, stares out from the blurry Polaroid. Standing by him is a boy with a deranged grin. The child is me; the 18th-century aristocrat is the actor Ryan O’Neal (19412023). It is July 1974 and we’ve been snapped on the set of Stanley Kubrick’s film Barry Lyndon, in which O’Neal plays the title role. I’m there because my father, André Morell, is also in the film (my mother was the actress Joan Greenwood). His determination to keep me away from showbusiness has been thwarted by the long summer holidays. There is nowhere else for me to go. We are filming at Longleat House, whose grounds are littered with motheaten lions, dazed by drizzle. My father bribes me with handfuls of loose…

PAUL CARTLEDGE Legion: Life in the Roman Army By Richard Abdy British Museum Press £45 The British Museum has been having a bit of a torrid time of late. To its rescue and even perhaps rehabilitation (something BP’s £50m subvention deal will not achieve) comes its first major exhibition of 2024, open now: Legion: Life in the Roman Army. The title and subtitle are suitably punchy, but they’re also more than slightly misleading. By no means all soldiers and auxiliary support personnel in Rome’s prodigiously far-flung imperial armies were either legionaries or serving a legion. (The exhibition’s handsome catalogue under review here has an excellent map of the Empire at its greatest extent, in about 117 AD.) Strictly, too, ‘and death’ should have been added to the subtitle after ‘life’.…

IVO DAWNAY Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class By Rob Henderson Forum £16.99 Not many misery memoirs follow a trajectory from catastrophically unstable childhood to a PhD from Cambridge University. But then not many Cambridge PhDs would describe education as ‘a red herring’ when it comes to contentment with one’s lot in life. Unlike our own, often Celtic, tradition of tortured upbringings – Angela’s Ashes and Shuggie Bain, to name but two – Henderson’s Californian version follows a classic Hollywood narrative arc of triumph over adversity. Yet that is not the point at all. Instead, this Korean-Mexican American’s journey from loveless foster homes through a tearaway teenage spell to the US Air Force, and finally to Yale and Cambridge, is more interesting for the socio-political conclusions…

Computer diaries My search for an attractive appointments diary begins around November. My needs are simple: sturdy cardboard pages to absorb any ink, a striking image on the front, a spiral binder for easy turning, and weekly photographs that please or surprise me. Instead, these days the bland front cover will, increasingly, be of cats. Or dogs. That is, if they even have them in my local stationer’s. I fear we are entering the last days of handwritten diaries since, for some reason, people prefer to keep their appointments on their phone. What a mistake! A paper diary is a joy to behold, not least because you can hold the damn thing, rather than staring at your screen. Every year is a unique image for me, from 2005’s Taschen All-American Ads…

Savoy Theatre, London, until 31st March If only modern playwrights were more like Neil Simon. The late great American dramatist, who died in 2018, at the grand old age of 91, was a master craftsman – a peerless writer of well-made plays about flawed yet sympathetic characters. Simon’s plots are entirely plausible, his dialogue is utterly believable – and yet his dramas are far funnier than real life. He finds humour in every human situation. Like his greatest hit, The Odd Couple, Plaza Suite has all these qualities, in spades. ‘No other playwright has had a greater influence on American popular culture,’ claims the director of this traditional, conventional production, John Benjamin Hickey. ‘Without him, there would be no Frasier, no Seinfeld.’ I’m inclined to agree. This play is really…

George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue turns 100 on 12th February. It wasn’t Gershwin’s best work but it was an epoch-defining one. The distillation in music of ‘the youthful zeitgeist of the Jazz Age’, said Scott Fitzgerald. And he would have known. That same year, he began work on his own epoch-defining masterpiece, The Great Gatsby. 12th February, Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, wasn’t the best date for bandleader Paul Whiteman to stage his gargantuan showcase event. With 36 items to sit through on a snowy February afternoon in New York’s overheated Aeolian Hall, some of the celebrity-packed audience had gone home by the time Gershwin got to play Rhapsody – number 35 on a programme scheduled to end with (of all things) Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance March No 1. The first Gershwin…

It all started with an invitation to stay at the Suffolk Hotel, in Aldeburgh. That was definitely the trigger. After decades of toeing the line and waiting to be invited – in vain – I was back on the wagon of IMS (Inviting Myself to Stay). Any first-night nerves that I might have lost the confident bravado of my youth were quickly dispelled. Turns out it’s like riding a bicycle. And even easier by email, given that one can copy and paste one’s self-invitation multiple times. It’s a game of attrition, really – not one for those with a fear of rejection. It was the weekend before Christmas – so I was banking on a poor response. But shock and awe are surprisingly devastating weapons. We emailed five ‘old friends’:…

Last month was AA renewal time – hence another negotiation. The three members of this household have comprehensive cover – home start, breakdown, recovery etc. Last year’s renewal quote was £400, reduced to £300 after a telephone call. This year it was £444, again reduced to £300 after another telephone call. Just ask for a discount. If you encounter resistance, say you’re thinking of moving elsewhere – and mean it. I suspect it’s the same with other breakdown services. Welcome though the discount is, it’s sad that we have to go through this annual ritual. Why isn’t loyalty – 57 years, in my case – rewarded with an automatic discount? Presumably because the private equity companies owning major breakdown services rely on unquestioned renewals to earn more money. On the…

Migration is an annual routine. The ‘irruption’ comes out of the need to survive. This is spectacularly true of the waxwing (Bombycilla garrulus), renowned for its beauty. ‘Waxwing winters’ occur – often at intervals of years – when starvation in the bird’s far northern breeding grounds forces it to wander. In 1955, when James Fisher’s Bird Recognition 3 was published, he wrote, ‘Most authorities hold that the waxwing is not migratory; but mass movements in search of food take place in every winter, though in some winters the flocks do not roam a very great distance from their breeding ground.’ Hence the excitement of British ‘waxwing winters’, which dates back to 1686. The 19th century saw five. Since 1990, waxwings have been seen every winter; an irruption, such as in…

Taking a Walk To hijack L P Hartley, the night is a foreign country; they do things differently there. And if that’s true, a night walk with a UV torch is an expedition to another planet. This was a simple stroll round a small common in the ordinary English countryside on a dark, dank night. I set out with my friend Jeremy Buxton, a farmer, and David Atthowe, a young man who is a kind of natural explorer. David has started night strolls with UV torches, which are a tool to take us into another wavelength. He handed us a torch each. These were ordinary-looking black torches, albeit unusually heavy. We strode down the track and onto Booton Common to a soundtrack of distant tawny owls. The night was still…

OAPs booked to Majorca fly to Menorca after airport mix-up Daily Mirror Vet issues warning over putting boots on your dog in cold weather Nottingham Post Four people trapped in toilets after lock failings, report states Peeblesshire News £15 for published contributions NEXT ISSUE The April issue is on sale on 6th March 2024. 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 2024 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 WERE AA route maps? It was the first excitement of holiday – when the route map came from the AA or RAC. The promise of exotic journeys through unknown territory – but with someone to guide you all the way. Before satnavs and Google maps, there was the personalised route. You wrote to the motoring organisations telling them where you were going, and they would send you a personalised strip map, duplicated, stapled and – in the case of the RAC – written in incredibly faint blue ink. Which is probably why my dad deserted them for the AA. More legible. Those were the days when motoring was still an adventure, when main roads still went straight through towns and you devised your own regular stops which became part…

It wasn’t unusual for England footballers to be mentioned in morning assembly at the grammar school I attended in Stoke-on-Trent in the fifties. Dennis Wilshaw, the Wolverhampton Wanderers and England inside forward, taught us PE and maths, and so we frequently heard of his achievements. One spring morning in 1955, the headmaster announced casually, ‘At Wembley Stadium on Saturday afternoon, Mr Wilshaw scored four goals in the Association Football international against Scotland.’ This made Dennis the first England player to score four in an international and the first to score a hat trick against ‘the old enemy’. We applauded politely – whooping and whistling not being on the curriculum back then. But with all due respect to the man who introduced me to quadratic equations, a few weeks later an…

If you want to get a real sense of an era, a good place to start is the display ads in the popular press. In the case of 1964, there was a good deal of talk about floor coverings, with several retailers noting that carpet prices were set to increase by a rather precise 7½ per cent over the year. Shoppers were urged to buy one of Cyril Lord’s ‘fabulous, quality products’, with a free bottle of Swift Rug Shampoo thrown in. Elsewhere, Pontin’s were offering DIY holidays in one of their luxury chalets, each with ‘kitchen, lounge, TV and fully-carpeted bedroom!’, starting at just £3 per person (around £45 today) a week. British parents were concerned about the accelerating plague of rock and roll, typified by the Beatles and…

Mary Killen’s Beauty Tips A few years ago, I went to stay with well-appointed friends who invited me to join them on a ride around their park. I replied that I hadn’t ridden for years and had lost my nerve on horses who, being instinctive, would be able to tell I was anxious and wouldn’t respect my authority. ‘Don’t worry,’ my friends replied. ‘You can go on Dumpy. Look at him – he’s the sweetest old boy imaginable. He never goes beyond ambling. It’s just like being on a sofa.’ We looked out of the window at the tethered Dumpy, small and squat, who was genially chewing cud and emanating calm. And so I found myself ambling along behind the others, thinking, ‘This is marvellous. I’m going to start riding…

At the beginning of News from Nowhere, William Morris’s novel about a utopian society of the future, the narrator takes a miserable journey from Farringdon to Hammersmith on the London Underground. He calls the tube ‘that stinking vapourbath of discontented humanity’. That would have been in 1890. Fast forward 134 years, put him on the Elizabeth Line and the Arts and Crafts pioneer would take a very different view. I ended up on this marvel of modern engineering by mistake: in general, I reject the tube, preferring to cycle around London. But a tennis injury put me out of bicycling action, and for a few weeks I took the underground into Soho from my office for my evenings of merrymaking. I took the Hammersmith and City Line – the very…

Sophia Waugh: School Days Esther McVey MP is a Minister without Portfolio – but she’s been nicknamed the Minister for Common Sense. It isn’t an official title, but it’s a very loud advertisement for the lack of common sense ruling this land for the past few years. The good old term ‘common sense’ is being thrown around by every Tom, Dick or Harry hoping for a vote. Now that people can’t really talk about ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ without raising someone’s hackles, there has to be some other way of taking the moral high ground. ‘Common sense’ appears to be it. The latest hero to join in is our future Prime Minister, Sir Keir. But no sooner does someone start talking about common sense than you begin to wonder whether their…

The Doctor’s Surgery General practice in the NHS is to the patient what the river was to Heraclitus: a patient cannot get to see the same doctor twice. This is both inhuman and wasteful of time and effort. A doctor who knows his or her patient retains a lot of implicit knowledge about them that cannot be fully conveyed in medical notes. The consultation begins the moment the patient comes through the door of the consulting room, and the doctor can glean much by the way the patient enters – especially if he or she knows them well already. Continuity of care, as it is called, used to be standard, but is so no longer. An article in the British Medical Journal salutes its virtues in medical practice and laments…

On 17th September 1986, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and Chancellor Helmut Kohl were to visit British Forces Germany. I was the responsible Chief of Staff. My Corps Commander briefed me: ‘We’ll send the Prime Minister and Chancellor down the range in main battle tanks … make sure she hits the target!’ I headed for BergenHohne ranges on historic Lüneburg Heath to set things up. The Royal Hussars would man the British Challenger; 24th Panzers, the German Leopard. ‘Make sure she hits the target,’ said I crisply, as practice began. On the day, RAF helicopters flew in the VIPs. Eighty reporters were clustered near the PM’s spin master, Bernard Ingham: ‘ Are you in charge, Brigadier?’ ‘I am if this goes wrong!’ I responded. ‘Make sure she hits the target,’ he…

History In April, it will be 150 years since a group of French painters put on a show at the former studio of the photographer Nadar in Paris. They called themselves the Société Anonyme des Artistes, Peintres, Sculpteurs et Graveurs. They had squabbled over the name. One of their number argued for ‘La Capucine’, a reference to the address of Nadar’s studio at Boulevard des Capucines. Capucine means nasturtium, and the idea was that this ‘victory flower’ could be a defiant symbol of the new brotherhood (which included one sister). We know them by a third name, given by a mocking journalist: the Impressionists. The offending hack was Louis LeRoy. He superciliously imagined the reaction of a connoisseur to the show, taking one of the paintings, Impression, Sunrise, as the…

Times Radio sent me a billet-doux recently. It said, ‘It’s that time of year when we spend even more time at home and if you have a radio in every room gathering dust, I promise you that you are going to love Times Radio.’ At Drivetime, there’ll be more politics while I ‘make the dinner or load the dishwasher’. AAAARRGH! ‘If you feel you’ve outgrown your usual radio station, try Times Radio. It’s free and at your fingertips.’ What year is this – 1954? The implications behind the letter (signed by the intelligent Aasmah Mir) were surprising. I subscribe to Times Radio anyway. I don’t require advice about an audio soundtrack to my chores. On the other hand, like most freelancers, I will undertake any task, however menial (as Anna…

Just as I was planning a pro-forma offering for this month – best albums of 2023, gigs to book in 2024 – I realised I’ve never yet devoted this space to Paul Simon. Rudimentary error. He is one of the many wrinklies who can get the whole of Hyde Park rocking out. I was there in the crowd, belting out You Can Call Me Al a few British Summer Times ago, along with other boomers. I was feeling pathetically lucky to be there with my £15 pint as the sun dipped and that sweet, pure voice basted us in classic folk honey from the Paul Simon (and Garfunkel) songbook. He was so good I’ve booked to see him when he’s in York in December, supported by the remnants of Fleetwood…

The perennial herb sweet cicely, having died down in November, is said to be the first to show itself each year, around the middle of February. It is a close-run thing with lovage, which should be about to appear above ground, and both are welcome harbingers of spring. With its fern-like leaves and white flowers, sweet cicely can be confused with cow parsley. Now is the time to sow the seed or, better still, buy a young plant which, when established, will self-seed and spread, growing up to five feet tall. It prefers a damp, well-drained soil and the leaves should be available in every month of the year except December and January. Sweet cicely is a very hardy plant, untroubled by disease and pests, and needs little attention. It…

This year marks the 30th anniversary of my first wine-tasting. Three decades of swirling, sniffing and spitting (and sometimes swallowing). Much has changed. In 1994, the typical taster was a tweedy, paunchy, ruddyfaced ex-public-schoolboy who looked askance at a long-haired, leatherjacketed young whippersnapper. I merely reinforced his long-held belief that the country had gone to the dogs. There were a few women, but nowhere near as many as, gratifyingly, attend tastings today. There was the sainted Jancis Robinson, of course, who has done much to encourage other women into the world of wine. And, in the early years, there was a formidable grande dame – Pamela Vandyke Price (she died ten years ago, aged 90) – who loathed any extraneous smells emanating from her fellow tasters. Perfume and aftershave were…

I’ve decided to become an online retailer and sell my vinyl record collection on eBay. Sales of vinyl are unexpectedly booming. So, rather than risk my heirs’ simply giving them away, I got selling, as I wrote here previously. Several readers have asked how I’m getting on. Progress is, frankly, slow, but I am modestly encouraged by a little success. In two months, I have sold 95 records and made £1,350 after all expenses (apart from my time). Not exactly riches, but not to be sneezed at. I stopped buying them in about 1984, when CDs arrived. So they’re rather dated. However, like book collectors, record collectors want the rarest and earliest possible edition. Some of my ancient stuff gleaned mostly from charity shops in my teens and twenties is…

Is there anything you can’t leave home without? A charger for my Apple Watch, notebooks and pencils. Is there something you really miss when you’re away? Test Match Special and The Archers, but you can hear them now if you’re cunning with a VPN. And Radio 4 generally. Do you travel light? I throw everything in and get annoyed with myself that there are all these things I didn’t need… What’s your favourite destination? A place I’ve never been before. I’ve travelled a great deal for the BBC and ITV, because of documentaries I’ve done. Also, I do like to travel for holidays with my husband. Earliest childhood holiday memories? Cornwall – and one remembers playing Scrabble while the rain beat against the window, and the offer of a speedboat…

I recall some 25 years ago, in the last round of the world’s top invitational event, my partner, Zia Mahmood, false-carded on defence by playing the knave from knave-nine doubleton of trumps; declarer later misread the position and took a deep finesse into his nine. This catapulted Zia and me to victory, the Polish player Piotr Tuszynski and partner finishing second. The opposing declarer who had fallen for Zia’s ruse was Tuszynski. The boot was on the other foot in this month’s deal from last year’s European Winter Games in Tignes. West led the queen of clubs versus the optimistic six hearts, declarer winning the ace. Needing a very favourable heart holding, he crossed to the ace of spades and led the two of hearts… 1. Skimpy but satisfies the…

Ask Virginia Dad's sex life? Eurrrghh! Q After my mother died, my father married my stepmother – he was in his late seventies, and she was only 40 – but now he’s died, she can’t step telling me in detail about their sex life. I feel so embarrassed hearing such intimate details about my father. I don’t want to cut off contact with my 12-year-old stepbrother, but how can I get her to stop? Sophia, by email A You could lie and tell her that he had an even more amazing sex life with your mother. (‘The things I could tell you!’) Or you could bang on about how theirs was the perfect marriage. They were more in love than Romeo and Juliet or Anthony and Cleopatra. It was so transcendent…