Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring 2024 i The Oldie

Gyles Brandreth's Diary Spring has sprung. The sap is rising. And I realise I have barely lived at all. I have just come from recording a conversation for my Rosebud podcast with the actor Rupert Everett, 64. Rupe has lived – and some. The star of My Best Friend's Wedding (and, more recently, The Happy Prince, the best of the several films about the life and downfall of Oscar Wilde) came to live in London's Earl's Court when he was just 15, quickly discovered the notorious Coleherne pub in the Old Brompton Road, and didn't look back. During his late teens, and into his twenties and beyond, sex was central to his existence. Young men, old men … he had them all – and women, too. Morning, noon and night,…

WHAT IS delulu? Delulu is short for delusional. It's another one of those Gen Z-isms, where people take a perfectly serviceable English word, abbreviate it in a quirky way and let it loose on the internet. See also: Oxford Word of the Year 2023, ‘rizz’ – short for charisma. Only, while the meaning of rizz is fairly straightforward – if you have ‘mad rizz’, it's a good thing! – delulu is a little more, shall we say, ambigugu. At first, it was an insult. Specifically, it was used by K-Pop fans to mock the most obsessive and delusional of their number. As in: ‘OMG, Stacey actually thinks Jungkook from BTS is going to respond to her Reel? Totally DELULU!’ Over time, however, delulu has evolved and is now used mostly…

The editor of this magazine actually asked me if I would write an article about how I would deal with actors’ egos. I replied that, although I've directed more than 30 feature films, I've found the actors (with very rare exceptions) to be co-operative and good-natured. But I could fill a book with anecdotes of the erratic, inexplicable and often hostile behaviour of film producers and production executives. When my film Breaker Morant (1980) was completed, the executive producer, John Morris, an old film buff (now deceased) with a remote manner, declared that the final scene had to be partially deleted. Morris's objection was that the two Australian soldiers, walking to their execution spot, held hands as they walked. Despite the fact that my research (a letter from a member…

Mary Killen's Beauty Tips The late, great Sir Terry Wogan regularly broadcast to eight million listeners on his Radio 2 show, Wake Up to Wogan. One morning, Wogan drew listeners’ attention to a beauty advert splashed over London billboards. It boasted that the product in question could ‘reduce the seven signs of ageing’. Wogan noted that the most obvious sign of ageing that he knew of had nothing to do with wrinkles, fine lines or sagging. It was the moment when a woman entered a shoe shop and pronounced the words ‘Those look comfortable.’ Even younger women suffer for their shoes – though not so badly as oldies. A few years ago, in the days when glossy magazines still had money to splash about, I attended a party in Fulham…

Town Mouse The little mice are slowly leaving the nest. We see them less and less. A few weeks ago, Mrs Mouse and I had our first taste of an empty house. We had a three-week stretch with no little mice in the house. Now Mrs Mouse had always feared this moment. Before the day came, she started looking at various therapists online, because she reckoned she might need some counselling. Well, we dropped the eldest mouse, who is 24, and still living at home, at the airport for a long business trip to India. Mrs Mouse shed a tear on the journey back and I feared the worst. Mothers don't like losing their children. I remember that when I was a country mouse living on a farm, when the…

Postcards from the Edge I've been a resident of Deal, near Dover, for more than 25 years, but now I'm in big trouble with the authorities. Like being expelled from convent boarding school, I wonder if I will soon be asked to leave town. My offence is that I had the house painted in what I thoughtwas a lovely Matisse blue. There were two other dwellings on our street painted blue, and I took inspiration from them. Previously, our house had been a faded, dirty yellow, showing every crack and stain. Passers-by thought the blue colour looked pretty. But then someone complained to the council that it was not in keeping with regulations. Eh? Which regulations? Deal has an old part of the town – Jacobean and Georgian – known…

The Doctor's Surgery Eternal adolescence – rather than eternal youth – is now the summum bonum of human existence. So it isn't surprising that more old people than ever before are smoking dope. Between 2006-07 and 2012-13, the percentage of over-65s who smoked in America increased by two and a half times. Those who smoke dope have not taken it up later in life. Most of them have been smoking for much of their lives, and purely for enjoyment. The dope they smoke, however, is much stronger than dope was when they started – up to five times as strong. Driving under the influence of cannabis is associated with an increased chance of accident. And so researchers in the United States performed experiments on 31 people aged, on average, nearly…

Early in 1978, as a young and relatively inexperienced stage manager, I was lucky to be employed on a West End revival of N C Hunter's 1950s play Waters of the Moon at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. This was to be a classy production, with the cast led by Ingrid Bergman and Wendy Hiller. It had begun life at Chichester Festival Theatre the preceding summer. Rehearsals began with a ‘meet and greet’: coffee, followed by a reading of the play. Having met the company, I seemed to have one more slightly older lady than I expected. The company manager explained that she was the author's wife, Germaine, who would attend rehearsals daily. Rehearsals progressed and the director, Patrick Garland, when faced with a question he did not want to address…

Fitted sheets They fit hardly any mattress known to man. They are invariably too big, too small, too deep, too shallow, too long or too short. They are an independent life force possessed of the devil. When you're putting them on and are triumphantly tugging down the fourth corner, two others leap back up and lie in a heap in the middle of the bed, almost crowing in triumph. Turn your back and another corner springs free. You race round the bed in a demented game of Whack the Rat. At night, they are sneakier. They creep quietly from under the mattress, away from the corners, until you find you are trying to sleep on a long ridge of elastic. Or on the mattress cover. Or on the bare mattress. Or…

Taking a Walk This is a magical place: a mystical grove that glimmered on the map; a small slip of green, surrounded by contour lines, bogs and military firing ranges. Black-a-Tor Copse is a fragment of a type of ancient woodland that has been returned to the public imagination by Guy Shrubsole. His book The Lost Rainforests of Britain breathes new life into the idea that damp, emerald-green, ferny woodlands along our archipelago's Atlantic edge are worth reviving. Wistman's Wood is a celebrity, highaltitude, ancient wood on Dartmoor, favoured for selfies among its fantastically gnarled oaks. Black-a-Tor, stuck out on the moor's unfashionable northern slopes, is much less visited, and more enticing. I struck out for Black-a-Tor with Guy on a filthy late-winter's morning. We walked briskly across the dam…

When Kingsley Amis learnt he'd won the Booker Prize, he assumed his Evelyn Waugh face: an apoplectic diehard, puffed up, empurpled and complete with bulging eyes. This was doubly appropriate. The face one of ‘Lucky Jim’ Dixon's party pieces. Also, Amis had come to resemble Waugh in real life. He once complained to a friend that, for 20 minutes, he'd sat at the Garrick Club bar ‘and nobody came near me.’ His friend replied, ‘Kingsley, doesn't it strike you that it could be because you can be so fucking curmudgeonly?’ Something similar happened to Waugh at White's. ‘Why are you alone?’ asked a fellow member. ‘Because no one wants to speak to me.’ ‘I can tell you exactly why: because you sit there on your arse looking like a stuck…

‘Should genocide really be the stuff of a night out at Carnegie Hall?’ asks Jeremy Eichner, author of Time's Echo, (Faber, 400pp, £21). Some would say no. That's why, at many performances of Arnold Schoenberg's A Survivor from Warsaw, the audience are asked not to clap. But, argues Eichner, you cannot blame composers who lived through the Second World War for seeking to memorialize their experience of it. Approaching his task with ‘the ears of a critic’ – he writes about music for the Boston Globe – ‘and the tools of a historian’, Eichner considers four works about the war, including A Survivor from Warsaw, Strauss's Metamorphosen, Shostakovich's Thirteenth Symphony and Britten's War Requiem. In the New York Times, Kira Thurman describes Time's Echo as ‘a compelling testimony to the…

Fiction soothes me. A good memoir is enjoyable enough and I like reading about current affairs, history and politics. Yet nothing compares with escaping into a novel. A novel never fails to reassure me that, despite all my supposed woes, I am merely suffering from being human. A great novelist's genius is to write imaginary experiences with such accurate understanding of our universal condition that we recognise ourselves immediately in the characters’ responses to what life throws at them. Fiction helps us understand that suffering is, by and large, experienced by us all similarly and makes us feel less isolated. The moment I began editing The Oldie's book supplements, I excitedly presented the team with a long list of novels for review round-ups. My designer winced – and not just…

ON GIVING UP ADAM PHILLIPS Hamish Hamilton, 160pp, £18 In The Spectator, Robert Adès found that in this ‘collection of seven new, loosely associated essays… two stand out in their brilliant use of the dialectical psychoanalytic method (otherwise known as the old switcheroo, or as Freud put it once: “Heads I win, tails you lose”). ‘A chapter titled “Dead or Alive” could have been called “How dead do we need to make ourselves in order to live?”’ One essay contends that censorship is necessary for intellectual survival, as only untrue statements pass the censor, never the true. ‘Phillips recasts this beautifully by referencing Nietzsche: we have censorship (rather than art) that we may not perish of truth.’ Adès concluded that ‘this short, subtle and nuanced book is a fast and…

Celia Johnson (p14) was one of Britain's greatest actresses. She starred in Brief Encounter, In Which We Serve and This Happy Breed. She wrote her previously unpublished Oldie piece in the 1950s. Nicky Haslam (p24) is a writer, interior designer and singer. He wrote Redeeming Features and produces annual Common List tea towels. He performs the songs of his old friend Cole Porter. Bruce Beresford (p32) directed the Oscar-winning Driving Miss Daisy. He also directed Breaker Morant and Don's Party. He wrote The Adventures of Barry McKenzie with Barry Humphries. Anne Robinson (p52), aka the Queen of Mean, presented The Weakest Link and Countdown. She worked on the Mail, the Sunday Times and the Mirror. She wrote Memoirs of an Unfit Mother.…

Grumpy Oldie Man If there was one thing my front garden didn't need to underscore the existing aura of dystopian gloom, that thing has come. For years, no one passing could glance towards the house without recognising it as the home of a sad little man who has given up on life. The crisp packets and used Durexes (Durices?) lobbed in from the street, the wild unevenness of the steps to the front door, the browned and desiccated old Christmas trees, the phalanx of wires flapping down from the roof … the clues have not strictly required the decryption services of Bletchley Park. It was with a gruelling sense of inevitability, then, that I recently noted the addition to this wretched montage of an infestation of rats. Although they showed…

For a short while, some years ago, I was a sort of sub-film star. This was very surprising, and by the time I had got used to it, I stopped being one. I was never very good, frankly. I was very bad at doing the sort of things that film stars are required to do by the publicity department. I remember in Paris being photographed shaking hands with the engine drivers at the Gare du Nord. I got the giggles and they must have thought me rather impolite but I wanted to tell them, as if they didn't know, that they were not shaking hands with a real film star but only with me, and that it was very nice of them to be so kind and pretend so well.…

Like all small children, I used to be fascinated by the semiforbidden contents of adults’ chests of drawers. One particular discovery, which I remember most vividly, was that of a heavy silk shawl intricately embroidered with small flowers and wrapped in tissue paper. It was never taken out and used or even mentioned. So, as a child, I had the impression that I was the only person to be aware of its existence. After my father, Vyvyan Holland, Oscar Wilde's son, died in 1967, I asked my mother about the shawl and she said rather vaguely that it had belonged to some girlfriend of his long before the war. I left it at that and the shawl remained more than ever a forgotten reminiscence in its crumpled tissue, a sort…

According to the greatest magazine editor of my generation, Graydon Carter, this is the Age of the Grifter. To that I would add ‘and the Gullible Punter’. Whenever I read of someone falling for one of the myriad scams abroad and ending up in the papers or on a podcast, I would unattractively congratulate myself that I'd never be so stupid. I would shake my head in wonderment as to how on earth my own brainy sister-in-law Caroline found herself withdrawing £4,000 in cash from her bank to hand to a man pretending to be a policeman who'd had rung her on her landline. ‘He told her that her credit card had been compromised and that she could help officers catch a ring of scammers by withdrawing a wad of…

Oldie Man of Letters The other day, on the anniversary of my father's death, I paid a trip back to the British Museum to see some of the things we used to enjoy together. The Prints and Drawings Room used to let us both in – child though I was – to leaf through paintings and drawings of clouds by John Constable. Now there is a deadly little exhibition there – Gesture and Line. Yawnsville. ‘Four post-war German and Austrian artists.’ A legacy, I suppose, of the disastrous period when Hartwig Fischer was the director, and on whose watch large numbers of artefacts were stolen. The British Museum is observably in a bad way. Fischer has to take a lot of the blame. But so does the vulgarian Chairman, George…

Country Mouse Since druidic times, physicians have recommended a change of location as a panacea. The nature-writer Richard Jefferies (1848-1887) said, ‘If men should acquire the art of flying, there can be no doubt that migration would become the custom, and whole nations would change their localities.’ I suspect Jefferies was envisaging wing suits or jet packs. For there is nothing artistic about the series of endurance tests that await the modern frequent, or even infrequent, flier who signs up for a misleadingly named ‘city break’. Even the rail journey to the airport must often be abandoned owing to the euphemisticallyknown ‘incidents on the line’. Dante's nine circles of Hell spring to mind as the passenger begins to pass through security. This now involves what feels to older geezers like…

‘For it is not against human enemies that we have to struggle, but against the sovereignties and the powers who originate in the darkness of this world’ (Ephesians 6:12). This passage from St Paul is typical in its reference to sovereignties and powers. They (and principalities) are scattered liberally throughout his writing. For St Paul and his contemporaries, these sovereignties were the evil spirits that rule the world in terrifying and unspeakable ways and about which it seems that we can do nothing. Although we no longer think in terms of evil spirits, these same principalities are still with us. In the older New Testament commentaries, they are translated as Nazism, racial hatred and drug addiction. We are no strangers to these horrors, and in the contemporary world many more…

Mystery camera man SIR: In 2016, my book A History of Magazine Design was published by that great oldie of a museum, the V&A. On page 15, there is a cover of the Weekly Illustrated Annual from 1937 (see picture). There were various candidates for ‘The Man Behind the Camera’, but I was never able to settle on one. Seeing the Jimmy Jarché self-portrait in your March issue makes me think I might have found him – the eye over camera, the hat, the cut of the sideburn. Please pass this on to Peter Suchet and ask him, ‘Could it be?’ Best wishes, Anthony Quinn, London NW6 Peter Suchet responds: ‘That's him, all right!’ Chilly Teasmade SIR: Peter York's affection for his Teasmade (April issue) is understandable, especially if he…

History Historians pride themselves on taking the long view. They strive to rise above our daily preoccupations while working on less smug-sounding variations of the conclusion ‘It's all happened before.’ Sometimes, that long view can get very long indeed. Peering back into prehistory, astonishing remains are still being uncovered. Less than a blink of an eye ago (in prehistoric terms), researchers in Norfolk in 2013 were able to show that fossilised hominid footprints beneath the sands of a Norfolk beach at Happisburgh were up to 950,000 years old. That's more than half a million years older than the oldest footprints discovered anywhere else in Europe, and the oldest outside Africa. Pictures of the footprints showed outlines that could have been left by anyone wading along the shore today. The find…

What are your earliest childhood holiday memories? When I was 10, I emigrated to New Zealand. So a lot of my holiday memories are travelling around New Zealand. Before that, during the war when it was more possible to travel, at least one or two holidays in South Wales in summer. Did you draw as a child? It was my thing; what I could do – I could draw. My mother had also been at the Slade. A gifted sculptor, she taught me quite a bit as a child. I remember my older brother asking for a slide rule for his birthday. He liked geometry and I was thinking, ‘God, that's so weird.’ What did you initially want to do? My father paid me an allowance while I was at…

My unfaithful husband Q Last year my husband had an affair with someone at his office. He's now given her up and says he regrets it, and he swears he loves me and the children, so we have made it up – but only up to a point. I just can't bear having sex with him any more. I do, but it's really difficult. All my friends say, ‘Just move on,’ but I don't seem to be able to. What can I do? Name and address supplied A ‘Just move on’ – what a completely useless piece of advice! After all, if you could move on, you would. You can't suddenly ‘move on’ from feeling completely cold – or even repulsed by the idea of sex – to burning with desire.…

FORBIDDEN DESIRE IN EARLY MODERN EUROPE MALE-MALE SEXUAL RELATIONS, 1400-1750 NOEL MALCOLM OUP, 608pp, £25 Historians of sex between men face an enormous challenge, wrote Catherine Fletcher in History Today, because ‘so many sources derive either from the prosecution of illegal acts, or from literary texts that were by necessity often coded. ‘One of the most thoughtprovoking books I have read in some time, Forbidden Desire is an ambitious comparative study of sex between men in the Mediterranean and northern Europe. Its argument unfolds in a very readable narrative… From the starting point of a scandalous case of sodomy in the household of the senior Venetian official in 16th-century Constantinople.’ Noel Malcolm compares patterns of sex between men between men in the eastern and western Mediterranean, then asks if these…

THE WILD MEN THE REMARKABLE STORY OF BRITAIN'S FIRST LABOUR GOVERNMENT DAVID TORRANCE Bloomsbury, 366pp, £20 As Labour continues to ride high in the polls and prepares for government once again, it is worth looking back on the first Labour government under Ramsay MacDonald in its centenary year. In The Wild Men, ‘David Torrance, a biographer and clerk at the House of Commons, tells the story of MacDonald's rise and the first Labour government, its people, policies and purpose, with sympathy and fastidious attention to detail,’ wrote Jason Cowley in the Sunday Times. ‘His reading and research are exemplary, but the focus is narrow: he conveys little sense of what Orwell called the social atmosphere of the country and is much more interested in people than in ideology or the…

Thief broke in ‘to make Pot Noodle’ Aberdeen Press and Journal Arrests after man had his hair pulled Oxford Times Man who was asked to leave King's Lynn nightclub said, ‘I'm not getting a f***ing taxi home’ Lynn News £15 for published contributions SIGN UP! SIGN UP! for the FREE Oldie newsletter Every Friday, we will send you the very latest stories and features – the more timely stuff which doesn't make it into the magazine. And a joke from the late great Barry Cryer. Plus you get advance notice of our literary lunches, reader trips and courses. Don't miss out. Go to www.theoldie.co.uk and enter your email address in this box: Sign up to our weekly e-newsletter…

WHAT WAS skiffle? Seventy years ago, in July 1954, Lonnie Donegan recorded his version of Rock Island Line. It reached the Top Ten in the hit parade on both sides of the Atlantic. Skiffle had arrived. The term ‘skiffle’ evokes a bunch of 1950s sixth-formers in NHS glasses earnestly lamenting life on the chain gang, but it inspired countless 1960s groups. A tape survives of John Lennon singing a skiffle song, Putting on the Style, with the Quarrymen on 6th July 1957. One theory about skiffle's origins is that it evolved from rent parties of the 1920s, where musicians played on improvised instruments to raise funds. By the early 1950s, the Yarmouthborn jazzman Ken Colyer formed a skiffle group within his band, with Alexis Korner and Anthony ‘Lonnie’ Donegan on…

In 1971, I was a medical student in Spain. Having done French at school, I decided English would be more useful for my future profession. I applied for a summer job in ten London hospitals. All of them answered politely, but only the National Hospital for Nervous Diseases, as it was then called, in London's Queen Square, offered me a nursing auxiliary job. There I saw the excellency of British neurology and some of its mythical consultants, such as the supremely gentlemanly sub-four-minute-miler Sir Roger Bannister. I remember him as a tall, lanky figure who walked intensely down the corridors with what looked like a worried smile. He wouldn't normally notice a minnow like me, but one day I coincided with him and another doctor in a cranky scissor-gate lift.…

Sophia Waugh: School Days A massive problem facing schools at the moment is the huge number of children who are persistently absent. ‘Persistently absent’ means they are in school for less than 90 per cent of the time – 20.6 per cent, a fifth, of school children fall into this category. This is the average. Primary schools have a lower rate of absenteeism than secondary schools. You see what a genuine problem we face. How can we get absent children to pass any exams, fitting them for the next stage of their lives? Only one in 20 children, whose attendance is 50 per cent or below, achieve five GCSE passes (at a four, which is the low pass), including English and maths. Compare the overall results of the rarely absent…

Sir John Major paid tribute at St Margaret's, Westminster, to Peter Brooke. As Northern Ireland Secretary, he did much to start the talks with the IRA that led to the Good Friday Agreement. As Culture Secretary, he introduced legislation to launch the National Lottery, which has raised £46bn for the arts and sport. ‘Peter was attractively innocent of black arts and slick deceptions,’ said Sir John. ‘They disfigure political life and were never for him. He could find a kindly word for the worst of rogues and, if he ever did feel ill will, he hid it.’ ‘Even so, he was shrewd about life and politics, except perhaps on one occasion.’ The former Prime Minister told how he first met Brooke 50 years ago when he was seeking election to…

I'm a boom baby, born before the NHS. I grew up in the slums of Aston in Birmingham – as did John ‘Ozzy’ Osbourne, now 75. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, I'd drink beer and play snooker with Ozzy, his dad, Jack, and his Uncle Jim – also known as Ozzy – along with my own dad, Frank, at the Brookvale Park Social Working Men's Club. My dad had been friends with the Osbourne family for years. Before the war, he lodged with Jim and Violet Osbourne, along with a woman known as Old Lady Osbourne in Turfpits Lane, Erdington. On Saturday nights, I'd go and listen to Ozzy's band in their earlier incarnation as Earth, a rock/blues band, at Henry's Blueshouse, upstairs at the Crown Pub in…

The best drink of the day is just before the first one. James Bond in Ian Fleming's The Man with the Golden Gun There's a difference between criminals and crooks. Crooks steal. Criminals blow some guy's brains out. I'm a crook. Ronnie Biggs What have I got? No looks, no money, no education. Just talent. Sammy Davis Jr I'm one of the ruins that Cromwell knocked about a bit. Marie Lloyd Friendship is born at the moment when one man says to another, ‘What! You too? I thought that no one but myself…’ CS Lewis I never predict anything, and I never will. Paul Gascoigne I sing each word as though it were my last on Earth. Mario Lanza My definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to…

Next time somebody criticises you for doing something ecologically evil such as owning a car or using a log-burner, ask them to glance at the phone in their hand – and consider how much energy, water and raw materials it is using up. Not so much the phone itself, although there are plenty of rare elements in it, but the various services it is connected to, especially data centres. Every time you send an email, a WhatsApp or a picture, the original stays on your phone and a copy passes into the big computers run by your email service, or phone provider. It stays there, and a copy is sent on to the equivalent in your recipient's services. It will keep it and send another copy to your friend. Webwatch…

TESSA CASTRO IN COMPETITION No 304 you were invited to write a poem called Balm. Soothed sensibilities led some to write poetic lines of excessive length untroubled by rhyme. Yet, without striving for metre and rhyme, Maggie Cobbett's short poem was rather sweet: ‘Balm for my soul / Or balm for his cracked heels? / No contest really. / I leave the bookshop behind / And head for the chemist's. / Passions cooled long ago, / But love remains.’ Phil Hornby came up with a complicated joke about a trumpet-blowing cricket fan joining the ‘balmy army’. Bill Inglis's conclusion should cheer someone: ‘The “balm” that's best for me – / And always does me good – / The tender love from she / Who's always by me stood.’ Commiserations to…

EMPIREWORLD HOW BRITISH IMPERIALISM HAS SHAPED THE GLOBE SATHNAM SANGHERA Viking, 464pp, £20 In this follow-up to his 2021 bestseller Empireland, wrote Andrew Marr in the Times, Sanghera ‘tries to understand why the modern British display such amnesia about their forebears’ vast, world-changing project.’ Although the book is ‘based on secondary sources, most readers will learn a lot, from the imperial origin of moustaches to the shameful invasion of Tibet, and Queen Elizabeth I complaining in 1596 about England being swamped by black immigration… Repeatedly the book emphasises that in virtually every period of imperial expansion, alongside the enthusiasts, there were just as many opponents in Britain.’ It helps too that ‘Sanghera has a good newspaper writer's eye for a vivid sentence.’ For Arjun Neil Alim, writing in the Evening…

As we civilians struggle with global recessions, cost of living crises, inflation, sluggish growth and all the rest of it, we continue to marvel at the stupendous wealth of a few tech billionaires who seem to have escaped the laws of economic gravity. Few escapes lately have been faster than those surfing the crypto bubble, and few were first as impressive and then as notorious as Sam Bankman-Fried. When Michael Lewis started writing his book Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon (Penguin, 272pp, £25), SB-F was in his impressive phase. Lewis, with his infallible nose for a good story, had secured unrivalled access to his subject and thought he was writing the inspirational tale of the world's youngest, coolest billionaire. Halfway through the process, SB-F's crypto…