Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2024 i The Oldie

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary Around 20 years ago in Dublin, I was chatting to the eminent Irish psychiatrist Dr Anthony Clare – the one we remember from In the Psychiatrist’s Chair on Radio 4. I was asking Anthony about an old friend of mine who, when I had first known him, had had difficulty with the truth. He simply couldn’t tell it. In his twenties and thirties he had been a habitual liar, even when he had no need to be. I said to Dr Clare that, now my friend was older, I thought he had changed. ‘I hope so,’ said the psychiatrist gently, ‘for his sake and for yours, but don’t rely on it. People can and do change with time, but as a rule they don’t.’ I thought about…

WHAT IS Temu? Temu is an online shop, operated by the Chinese e-commerce giant PDD Holdings and headquartered in Ireland. It features prices so implausibly low, and adverts so accurately targeted, that you can’t help wondering if witchcraft is involved. ‘Shop Like a Billionaire’ is the tagline. To the best of my knowledge, billionaires do not tend to order knockoff Crocs of mysterious provenance after being lured with a free £80 voucher on Instagram. And yet it’s hard to argue with those prices. There’s a heptagonal purple box for storing your weekly pills for 28p. A stainless-steel tongue-scraper for 58p. An erotic fishnet, open-crotch bodystocking? 99p. The reviews of the bodystocking are great too: ‘Perfect, sexy, partner loved this,’ writes Scott Grant, UK. Because nothing says ‘I value and respect…

Sometimes, good people have to join together and risk their lives to stop aggression and gangsterism. Here is a small example from 80 years ago. On the morning of 21st September 1944, 114 Douglas C-47 transport planes of the US Army Air Force took off from airfields in England with 1,543 Polish paratroopers on board. Some of the planes had been nicknamed by their crews. My father, Captain Stanisław Karpiński, was on board a plane called The Wild Hare -echoing the title of the first Bugs Bunny film, released by Warner Brothers in 1940. The Poles were on their way to the Battle of Arnhem, part of Operation Market Garden – an ambitious Allied Second World War offensive. The plan was for a spearhead of British tanks to race across…

 Before the pandemic, I was a regular at the pub. Once or twice a week I, and my elderly mates Boot, Mason and Riley would gather at our Cotswolds local and gas away over a couple of bottles of wine. And then Covid arrived. So we moved our pub to Zoom. At first, connecting our respective homes via the internet was a technical nightmare. Boot’s erratic volume control and the crunch of his pork scratchings made many a conversation inaudible. Riley’s lip-synching delay was blamed on his erratic connection, while Mason couldn’t get his iPhone to stay upright despite experimenting with Blu Tack. However, once the techie troubles were sorted, we would link up digitally at six every evening, open our respective bottles of wine and gossip in the virtual…

It was in the summer of 1985 when my dad, who was Ronnie Kray’s solicitor, asked me to come with him to Broadmoor Hospital. I was a teenager doing work experience in his legal firm and he needed me to take notes. The journey to Crowthorne in Berkshire took about an hour in his new Mercedes Coupé. ‘Let me do the talking,’ Dad said as we drove through the gates and on to security, after telling the guard that we were here to see ‘Ron’. The building was less intimidating than I had hoped. There were no inmates screaming behind bars and no chains, just a faint whiff of Milton fluid in the air. We followed the guard, who was carrying an enormous set of keys, through a corridor of…

Town Mouse I’ve just published Idle Thoughts, a humble collection of 40 letters. They were written and addressed to the readers of the Idler, the magazine I edit, over the last few years. While assembling it, I reflected on the lost art of letter-writing. Letters were for millennia – and till very recently, when they were ruthlessly attacked by the overlords of Silicon Valley – at the beating heart of artistic and commercial production. Letters are a wonderfully elastic literary form. They can be chatty or formal. They can be any length. And they can include gossip, moaning, expressions of love, poetry, travel tales, confessions, anecdotes, philosophical reflection, advice, moral admonishment, jokes, drawings, diagrams, financial advice… The letters in my book are open – intended for a wide audience. They’re…

Jem Clarke is in his very, very early fifties, is five foot zero inches tall and has never left the family home in Cleethorpes, which he shares with his parents… For a man with a Costa café on my corner, and a desire to seek afternoon refuge from my increasingly demanding parents, something terrible has happened to me. I have fallen out of love with coffee. Noel, who works in a medical centre as something approximating a receptionist with some patient-referring powers (a half-nurse, I suppose), sits at an adjacent table in said café. He always irritates me by staring at his croissant with intense loathing, as if he hadn’t actually ordered it. Normally, I can relax into my own roasted-beans brew only once he has gulped it down in…

Television presenter Kirstie Allsopp gave the eulogy for her father, Lord Hindlip, former Chairman of Christie’s, at the Grosvenor Chapel in South Audley Street. Hindlip was a skilled auctioneer, who sold Van Gogh’s Sunflowers for £24m in 1987. In 1997, he sold Princess Diana’s dresses for charity. As he said, ‘I placed a perfunctory hand on her shoulder’ – although photographs showed his hand somewhat lower down. He was also one of the few interviewees who got the better of Sacha Baron Cohen’s spoof interviewer, Ali G. The service sheet announced, ‘The congregation stands for the arrival of The Queen, also representing The King.’ Camilla’s ex-husband, Brigadier Andrew Parker Bowles, was also there. Six of Charlie Hindlip’s grandchildren – Oscar Andersen, Charlie Fletcher, Coco Fletcher, Jasper Allsopp, Elsie Allsopp and…

CHRISTOPHER HOWSE The Medieval Scriptorium: Making Books in the Middle Ages By Sara J Charles Reaktion Books £16.99 A red pillar box outside 78 Banbury Road, Oxford, was installed by the Post Office in 1885 specially for James Murray, the first editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, so voluminous was his correspondence with contributors. For his dictionary staff, he built a big, corrugated-iron shed, damp, dark and full of fumes, half-sunk in the ground, which he called the Scriptorium. How different, we may think, from the lofty, stone-arched scriptoria where monks produced dazzling copies of manuscripts for centuries, till Gutenberg and his chums spoilt everything with printing. On a wonderful plan of a monastery, drawn in about 820 AD at St Gall (Switzerland) on parchment 44 inches wide, the little,…

PAUL LAY Oliver Cromwell: Commander in Chief By Ronald Hutton Yale £25 Those of us who have written about Oliver Cromwell and the extraordinarily dramatic period of British history he dominated can still be surprised at just how contentious a figure he remains more than 350 years after his death. And this is despite a slew of recent, acclaimed studies that have sought to bring nuance to this period that threatens – at last, and rightly – to usurp the Tudors as the focus of British popular history. Publishers, it seems, have caught up with the age that saw the rise of a nascent British Empire and the creation of Britain’s modern army; that unified, albeit by force, the constituent nations of these islands; that established the political and ecclesiastical…

Who really enjoys life? Kids when you get down to it – kids are the only ones who really get a kick out of being alive. Nell Dunn I’m the shyest megalomaniac you’re ever likely to meet. Kate Bush What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character? Henry James Euthanasia is against my religion so I decided to murder her. Joe Orton, Loot One must keep a few smiles aside to laugh at oneself on joyless days. Charles Trenet … the satisfaction of finding someone else to take control of things. Evelyn Waugh, Officers and Gentlemen In any moment of decision, the best thing you can do is the right thing, the next best thing is the wrong thing, and the worst…

Touring, until 5th October Fifty years ago, American choreographer Michael Bennett came up with a great idea for a backstage musical. Rather than going behind the scenes at a Broadway show, why not focus on the auditions? And rather than telling the stories of the leading players, why not focus on the chorus line? Bennett’s concept was inspired. As TV shows like Britain’s Got Talent prove, we all love to eavesdrop on the ruthless culling of the casting process – and unknown wannabes are far more appealing than self-entitled stars. What made A Chorus Line unique was that Bennett based this musical on a series of tape-recorded interviews with jobbing dancers, in which they revealed the hardships and heartaches of their working (and private) lives. Directed by Bennett, with music…

In the internet Olympics, the gold medal for most popular search topic has for ever been won by pornography. Weather has always won bronze, while it is received wisdom that silver has long gone to ancestry research. This may have been true 20 years ago but, now that we’ve all discovered our lineage lacks any spark, let alone grandeur, we have abandoned the hunt. And ‘translate’ has claimed silver. My 28-year-old daughter, Honor, is one of the few people I know who can honestly claim to have absolutely no truck with class and its feeble echelons. That is only because she has gone deeper. For her, it’s all about pre-history. Just like a dinner-party astrologist, who announces that your dislike of milk in your coffee is down to your moon…

Why buy a Jaguar? It was easier to answer the question in the past. I’ve had five – three 1960s Mark 11s, a 1970s XJ6 and a 2003 XJ (X350). I bought them because they looked good, felt good to drive and were value for money. And you could always sell an old Jag. Sir William Lyons founded the company as SS (Swallow Sidecar) Jaguar in 1922. It became plain Jaguar in 1945 – SS had by then acquired unfortunate associations. Le Mans successes during the 1950s earned the company its sporting reputation. This was augmented by the big Mark 7-9 saloons, which offered Bentley levels of luxury and better performance at a fraction of the price. There followed the svelte and beautiful Mark 1 and Mark 2 compact saloons,…

Taking a Walk Beyond the hot spots and honeypots, gridlock and retail parks, England can still be eerily empty of people. I took a walk in south Shropshire one sultry afternoon – two hours through forests and footpaths – and met no one. This was a woodland walk, and forest rides are usually bustling with enthusiastic bikers, hikers and dog-walkers, but here there was no trace of anyone – not even the drone of a distant tractor. During a mile along a twisting country lane with its mohican of grass, one venerable car chugged past, the back seats piled high with toilet rolls. Ours is a strange land. I began my walk at the Hurst, John Osborne’s former country pad, now a writing centre for the Arvon Foundation. It looks…

Edward Fox (p17) was in The Go-Between (1971) and Day of the Jackal (1973). He played Lieutenant General Sir Brian Horrocks in A Bridge Too Far (1977). He was our Oldie Stager of the Year in 2022. Quentin Blake (p22) has illustrated more than 300 books, including 18 by Roald Dahl. He has illustrated books by Sylvia Plath and Dr Seuss. He founded the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration. John Craxton (1922-2009) (p28) painted renowned pictures of Crete, where he lived for many years. He illustrated books by Patrick Leigh Fermor. Craxton’s Cats, by Andrew Lambirth, is out on 29th August. Daisy Dunn (p59) is author of The Missing Thread, Not Far from Brideshead, In the Shadow of Vesuvius and Catullus’s Bedspread. She wrote the Ladybird Guide to Homer.…

Grumpy Oldie Man As one of Earth’s top-ranked hypochondriacs, I found one of the best things about the recent Olympiad was its efficacy as a diagnostic tool. Among the many ailments of which I live in fear is Sjögren’s syndrome. This auto-immune disease has various effects, such as joint pain and fatigue, that could be confused with typical signs of ageing. But one symptom that couldn’t is the inability – due to inflammation of the lachrymal glands – to cry. Having spent a recent fortnight drenched in a Niagara of Olympicinspired tears, I am reassured there. Without a tally of exactly how often events in Paris had a hand in my reaching for the Kleenex, suffice it to report this: the frequency rendered the average 15-year-old boy a feckless dilettante.…

The stories of Babar are embedded in many an oldie’s childhood memory. But it wasn’t until Laurent de Brunhoff died this March, aged 98 (his father, Jean, the Babar creator, died from TB in 1937, aged only 37), that I realised how little I knew about Babar’s creators. At the time, my youngest daughter and I were downsizing from a threestorey house to a two-bedroom flat. I’d had to rid myself of most of my books -a painful process which I’ve written about in these pages. I’d sold some paintings and distributed the rest amongst friends. Yet one artwork, a poster of Babar, survived the savage cull, along with a couple Babar books and a cuddly Babar, from whom my daughter (now 20) had never been parted. Her Babar wears…

In 2001, Robbie Williams, at the very height of his fame, wanted a break. His managers struck a deal with him. If he would agree to a book, they said, he could have a year off. I was signed up to write it, but I didn’t meet the man himself until I was at Heathrow. Suddenly there he was, large as life. Despite my best intentions, I found I was weirdly starstruck, barely able to speak. ‘Let’s get together for supper in Stockholm,’ he said kindly, before retreating into his protective entourage. That supper never happened. No sooner had we checked into Stockholm’s gorgeous Grand Hotel than I got a call from Rob’s diminutive minder, Josie. Rob had crashed out. Perhaps we could do lunch tomorrow. But when the time…

Oldie Man of Letters The older I grow, the more aware I become of those writers who did not die fashionably young, like Keats or Novalis, nor retire, like lazy old E M Forster. Instead, they continued to work into their old age, raging against the dying of the light, and refusing to enter the President Biden Twilight Home of the Faded Imagination. Slight jitters assail me, as the day approaches when my book on Goethe will be published. On 20th September, there will be a concert to celebrate it – and Goethe – at the Wigmore Hall, and there will be a presentation at the British Library. The great German is not much read in England now, but he is worth celebrating: a scientist, a politician, the greatest of…

In November 1979, I joined Express Newspapers and became a copytaker in their Manchester office. There were 22 of us and, supplied with headphones and sit-up-and-beg typewriters, we typed other people’s stories at the speed at which they spoke. This was not as daunting as it sounds, primarily because not all our callers were compos mentis when they rang. We could also use various abbreviations, thereby pre-empting the dawn of text speak by about 15 years. I soon learned the mantra ‘I’m doing this off the top of my head.’ It was intoned by journalists covering an ongoing – usually a sporting – event. ‘Could we just go back to the paragraph before last?’ we would ask. Copytakers were invariably blamed when phone lines started to crackle. A colleague was…

Country Mouse This year, I have cut no corners in the preparation required for growing my own gourmet vegetables. I doubt sincerely that there is an economic argument for growing them, once you have factored in the vast amounts of bought seed compost, alpine grit and vermiculite required to grow them in modules, when once they were sown directly in the ground. Fertile pits and enriched trenches were dug by this hobby grower in a festival of vernal activity. I backfilled with best greensand-derived grade-one topsoil, which has had 35 years to ‘heal’ itself from its former intensive, high-input mono-crop system. I solemnly sowed my broad (aka fava) beans in line with the slow food/slow life market-town lifestyle, where hand-grown vegetables and their consumption are almost fetishised. And, for all…

I’d heard all about Dr Tim Spector’s fashionable theory: what matters more than calorie-counting is the bacteria in your gut. I cook from scratch, don’t buy junk and eat lots of veg. So I’d resisted joining Zoe, Spector’s personalised nutrition programme, to find out about my microbiome and how to improve it. It looked to me too much like a neat way to part body-obsessed rich young women from their money. But I thought I should maybe put my prejudices aside and at least read Spector’s book, Food for Life. I heartily recommend it. Spector, who is a serious epidemiologist and medical doctor, doesn’t make extravagant claims – just perfect sense. He tells you what, when and how to eat, spells out foods’ nutritional benefits – or lack of them…

The Doctor’s Surgery Diagnosis by video clip is always hazardous, especially for conditions such as dementia that develop over time. But few people can have observed the sequences of President Biden losing his drift in mid-sentence, being unable to find his way off a stage or freezing, without some degree of pity for an old person who is clearly past his best. Others of his age are as sharp as a tack. Second childhood and mere oblivion are not the inevitable accompaniments of great age. President Biden is 81 – the same age as Mick Jagger, who is still touring the world in rude health. It is salutary to remember that Verdi composed Otello when he was 80. Where there is such variability, of course, the question arises as to…

JASPER REES Tell Me Everything By Elizabeth Strout Viking £16.99 If you haven’t read a novel by Elizabeth Strout, where’s best to start? Probably with Olive Kitteridge (2008), which tells of a crotchety pillar of the community living by the sea in Strout’s home state of Maine. She proved so popular that she returned in Olive, Again. Or you could dive into My Name Is Lucy Barton (2016), about a novelist based in New York who survived a dire childhood in rural Illinois. Lucy proved so popular that she too came back in three further books. Now it’s the turn of Bob Burgess, who first co-starred with his big-shot older brother, Jim, in The Burgess Boys (2013). They also had an awful upbringing in Maine, but both escaped as lawyers…

CHRISTOPHER BRAY The Newsmongers: A History of Tabloid Journalism By Terry Kirby Reaktion Books £20 Years ago, when I was a young sub-editor on the Mirror, the boss called me over and asked if I’d done the stars for the Saturday just gone. Yes, I had. ‘Well you put next Saturday’s in, Chris.’ I winced. ‘I’m just warning you,’ the editor said. ‘The next sub to f**k up the stars is out the door.’ Knees knocking, I returned to my desk. An older colleague, who’d been with the paper for years (and was paid about four times what I was, for working half the hours), piped up, ‘You know, back in the day, if you’d cocked up, you’d have just told the gaffer, “I was pissed,” and he’d have said,…

Massacre at Mycenae DAISY DUNN The Voyage Home By Pat Barker Hamish Hamilton £20 ‘Men begin and end their lives as helpless lumps of flesh in the hands of women, and all the years between -power, success, wealth, fame, even victory in war – are merely a doomed attempt at escape.’ In a sentence, Pat Barker skewers every last achievement of Agamemnon, King of Mycenae, who led the Greek army to victory over Troy in Homer’s Iliad. The Voyage Home is the dramatic sequel to The Silence of the Girls and The Women of Troy, Barker’s bestselling novels inspired by the Trojan War. While those books reimagined the events of that conflict from the perspective of the women entangled in it, this one is concerned with the homecoming of its…

Builder’s tea Chai? Camomile? Ayurvedic masculine support? No, thanks; just ordinary tea, please. Oh dear. Here we go again. Eyebrows raised, lips pursed – my hosts are looking as if I’ve asked to borrow their haemorrhoid cream. But no, all I want is a cup of tea. And yes, I have tried the other stuff and some of it is quite nice. Mostly though, I prefer ordinary tea. Or tea, as it used to be called. The kettle-owners then struggle to process my inexplicable position. What can I mean? I am, they used to think, not quite an idiot. Finally, they rationalise my madness as follows: ‘Aah,’ they say knowingly, ‘builder’s tea!’ They seem to think I am, like Marie Antoinette, playing at being a peasant. Or perhaps I am my…

The last time I took a month off from The Oldie was 30 years ago, when I was away in beautiful Boston writing a book. Peter Black of the Daily Mail stood in: he wrote welcoming the new station Classic FM (apart from its ‘idiotic’ ads). He wondered how cricket could ever get on without the late Johnners, who’d ponder what cake there’d be for tea (‘Oh good – tuck time’) and had ‘the most amiable face I ever saw, and the friendliest candid eyes that ever straddled a nose’. This summer, my irrepressible old friend Hunter Davies stepped in. I’m glad he mentioned his exuberant intrusion into the Today programme – and quite rightly he complained about endless programmes about mental health on Radio 4. I agree. Amol Rajan…

David Hepworth has a theory – and, having worked with him on magazines, TV and podcasts for over 40 years, I can assure you he’s never wrong. The rock career, he declares, is essentially a three-act play. Act One is the devil-may-care first flush of youth where you make your name, get screamed at and all your audience is under 30. The second is the sagging middle section where the young think you’re embarrassing and your fans are too busy with work and offspring to stay onboard. But the third act, if you’re lucky enough to reach it, is the jackpot. You’re hailed as the noble figurehead of a golden age most of the media wished they’d lived through, everything you recorded is now on the net, and your fans…

I first came across Padrón peppers in a tapas bar in Santiago de Compostela, north-west Spain, not far from the town where they were first grown in Europe and which gives the peppers their name. I have been growing them in an unheated greenhouse for the past ten years, and their popularity is now such that they are available in some supermarkets. We picked our first Padróns this year in the second week of July and enjoyed them in the traditional way,…

Len Evans, who was born in Wales, grew up in England and emigrated to Australia, was famous for many reasons. He was Australia’s first wine columnist. He turned his hand to winemaking, at Rothbury Estate and Petaluma. And his – shall we say? – ‘broad’ sense of humour would have made Sir Les Patterson blush. Most importantly, he was a great evangelist for Australian wine at a time – the 1960s and 1970s – when it was largely derided. Monty Python’s ‘Perth Pink’ sparkling wine, ‘a wine for laying down and avoiding’, springs to mind. He also claimed to have invented the Wine Options game. This involves a blind tasting in which participants are gradually whittled down as the host asks questions about the wine – which country, grape variety,…

Twenty years ago, one of the most regular questions I had was how to protect our computers from attacks by viruses, worms, Trojans, malware and other dire threats. In other words, which antivirus software should we buy? It used to be a hot topic; none of us really understood what these menaces were, but we feared them and so regularly forked out for extra software to shield our equipment from them. Norton and McAfee were the two biggest suppliers. No doubt a few readers of The Oldie are still paying for their products, especially if their computer is a few years old. A recent survey by security.org, a respectable organisation, discovered that although almost half of US citizens do not pay for antivirus software, usage increases with age. Twice as…

IN COMPETITION No 309 you were invited to write a poem called An Ill Wind. I was surprised by the popularity of breaking wind among the entries. And I don’t know whether the wind blew some competitors’ verse into lines of unmanageable length. Even so, your entries produced a boisterous breath of air at the receiving end. Bill Greenwell imagined the hardesthearted appreciation of an ill wind, after a daughter blew herself up and her father saw the silver lining: ‘Besides, thought Father, quite the chef,/ There’s fewer mouths to feed,/ And I can now afford a Neff –/ A stroke of luck indeed!’ Commiserations to him and to Matt Brookwell, Jane Moth, Brian Howe, Ian Nicol, Imogen Thomas, Angela Ryder, Dorothy Pope, D A Prince, Erika Fairhead, Andrew Bamji,…

Man refuses to switch seats with passenger on flight Independent Local artist confirms he is NOT responsible for ‘Banksy’ drawing by Marlow school Bucks Free Press Horse bolts as pub closes for revamp Sentinel £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 WERE proverbs? Like most children of my generation, I was brought up learning proverbs – not the Biblical ones, but the ‘More haste, less speed’ kind. At school, we ploughed through countless exercises which required us to fill in the gaps, eg, ‘A rolling ___ gathers no ___’ or ‘Waste ___, want ___.’ We had to make equivalences. Did ‘Look before you leap’ mean the same as ‘Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched’ or ‘Don’t cross the bridge before you come to it’? And was its opposite ‘He who hesitates is lost’ or ‘Strike while the iron is hot’? I wonder now whether the formal inculcation of these precepts was moral pedagogy. Or an attempt to instil memorable phrases which, incidentally, encapsulated ancient lore. Was the intention to…

At last, Britain is to have a gallery devoted to illustration! Named after Quentin Blake – and generously endowed by him – the gallery will open in 2026. It will be housed in forgotten Georgian and Victorian industrial buildings in a lost corner of Islington. For 250 years, from the days of Gillray, Rowlandson and Cruikshank till now, we’ve had some of the greatest illustrators and cartoonists. And yet we’ve always treated them as the second-rate cousins of so-called ‘fine artists’. When Ronald Searle (1920-2011) – the finest British cartoonist of the last century, creator of the immortal Molesworth and the St Trinian’s girls – died, he left his complete works to the Wilhelm Busch Museum in Hanover. There was no equivalent British place to bequeath his archive to. There…

Letter from America Joe Biden once told me he got into the 2020 presidential race because ‘I want to make a difference.’ I was one of a crowd of people milling around the Boeing aircraft assembly line in Seattle when he swung by to announce his candidacy five years ago. After saying that, Biden paused briefly, as if to ask himself what the formula really meant. ‘You can argue that it’s all about the great national issues, but it’s also about restoring a culture of civility,’ he said. ‘It’s about all of us coming together as Americans, and treating each other with respect, whether you agree with people’s opinions or not.’ Fine words, even if a cynic might argue that they qualified as one of Joe’s more articulate pronouncements on…

Sophia Waugh: School Days So here we are again. Another year over, another set of students shuffled off and the longed-for hiatus between this set and the next. The cycle continues. It hasn’t been a good end to this year, I must admit. I am wondering if I am beginning to run out of steam in the worst way of all – just not caring. This is probably because I haven’t had any Year 11s this year. So the annual cycle has been a bit like Turnip Townshend working with only three out of his four crops. I’m not sure that lying fallow has rejuvenated me in the way the clover and turnips do the earth. Add to that the effect of my two Year 10 groups. Two bottom sets…

Mary Killen’s Beauty Tips Considering how useful the pocket is, it’s not nearly widespread enough in modern clothing. Pockets have been helping us for thousands of years. A perfectly preserved mummy of someone believed to have lived between 3350 and 3105 BC was found in the Ötztal Alps, in Italy, with an intact pouch containing useful items and tools sewn into his belt. In the 16th century, pockets had to be concealed under clothing to outwit pickpockets and were sewn into belts and girdles. It wasn’t until the late-17th century that pouches were rationalised into more functional pockets. These began to be sewn into men’s garments, but not women’s. Women still usually had to fasten something to a belt under layers of skirts and petticoats, making such pouches much less…

Postcards from the Edge Have you ever felt you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and you were taking the wrong direction in your life? This epiphany occurred to me on the night of 9th November 1989 – the date the Berlin Wall fell. I was on my feet at the Oxford Union, debating against the famous sex therapist Ruth Westheimer, known universally as Dr Ruth. She has just died, at 96. She was known for the frank advice she doled out to folks with anxieties about doin’ what comes nat’rally. The motion involved the joys – or drawbacks – of sexual liberation and I was, of course, to lose the debate. The 2,000 undergraduates wildly cheered Dr Ruth (4 ft 7 in) for her frank advocacy…

In these days of modern medicine, do we have the right to ask for miraculous cures? I have no intention of answering this question. I prefer to go to John 4:48 -Jesus’s somewhat astringent answer to the court official’s request that Jesus go to his house to cure his son who is on the point of death. Jesus says, ‘Unless you see signs and wonders, you will not believe.’ As we know, the son is cured. The rebuke is not directed so much to the anxious father, but rather to those standing by. This applies not only to the contemporaries of Jesus, but also to all subsequent generations, including ours. One should not assume that true faith cannot find any place for the miraculous. But faith that cannot believe in…

Stupid Iris Murdoch SIR: In his column in the August issue, A N Wilson says that if private schools are done away with, the only people left will be (his words) ‘stupid people’. To bolster his case for cleverness he mentions Iris Murdoch, ‘who would have loathed the private-school tax’. Well, I knew Iris pretty well and she was pretty stupid. She thought Barbara Windsor was a relative of the Queen. She thought Proust’s novel opened with Marcel getting up early, instead of going to bed early. There was a lot like that. My late cousin Jeremy Lewis had a frightful time editing the cock-ups out of her novels at Chatto – the London Underground system and topography would be all to pot; chronology never made sense. But my point…

I never expected to find myself considering the subject of male impotence while researching in the British Library. Then an extraordinary coincidence took place, involving that research in the British Library and a cricket match in Berkshire. It all began with poor Marie Antoinette, sent away from Austria to France far too young. The wedding night of two teenagers – the future Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette – was witnessed by savage courtiers, and found distinctly wanting. Naturally, I had to probe the unfortunate failure of the young Louis and consider the various theories that might explain it. Was it in fact the fault of Marie Antoinette? That seemed a bit unfair, considering her extreme youth. Or was it, as seemed far more likely, the failure of the royal French…

IVO DAWNAY On the Edge: The Art of Risking Everything By Nate Silver Allen Lane £30 You need to be a statistician or maths geek to get full value from Nate Silver’s latest book. But then you can get a considerable percentage of value even if you are not. In fact, that is what the book is all about: percentages, probabilities and what is a good bet – the abstruse concept of ‘positive expected value’ (+EV). Silver was a poker-player who evolved his methodology through baseball bets and his FiveThirtyEight website which predicted Congressional races with alarming accuracy. In 2016, he gave Donald Trump a 29-per-cent chance of winning; Hillary Clinton scored at 71 per cent. Most pollsters and commentators before the vote said his figures showed he was an…

History Have we spoiled Europe? By ‘we’, I mean the British. And by ‘Europe’, I mean the bits we visit on our summer holidays. Mass protests against tourists have been taking place in Mallorca and Barcelona. Ever since the advent of mass tourism, and the orgy of dodgy development that accompanied it, we’ve been told, ‘You should have seen the place before we got there – it was so “unspoiled”.’ For anyone who’s visited Torremelinos (once an Andalusian fishing village, now a city of roughly 70,000, crammed with high-rises) or the gimcrack developments in parts of the Canaries, it’s hard to disagree. But superior Brits have been telling their less-well-travelled compatriots that it’s all too late for a long time. Lucy Lethbridge, in her book on Britons abroad, Tourists, mentions…

Every time a major movie star washes up on a minor television series, I’m reminded of Norma Desmond being told by Joe Gillis that she used to be big: ‘I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.’ Sam Neill, aka Damien Thorn, the anti-Christ in Omen III, and Dr Alan Grant, the palaeontologist in the Jurassic Park and Jurassic World trilogies, is currently playing Senior Counsel Brett Colby in The Twelve (ITV). Pictures don’t get much smaller than this, but Neill is still, at 76, looking pleased with himself, his black gown billowing behind him, his wing collar and bands as starched as the bed sheets in the Ritz. An Australian adaptation of the Belgian series De Twaalf, The Twelve is a legal drama focusing on the lives of…

Calling all jam-makers, preservers and picklers – trainees and old-timers. It’s that time of year. Apricots, peaches, damsons and plums are ripe and ready in orchards, hedgerows and gardens throughout the land. Eliza Acton gets straight to the point with ‘General Rules for Preserving’ in Modern Cookery for Private Families (1845): ‘Let everything be clean and dry. Keep the preserving pan away from the direct heat of a flame or the base will burn. After sugar is added, stir gently at first and more quickly towards the end. Clear scum as soon as it rises. To preserve fruit in syrup, cook first until soft enough to absorb the sugar. When preparing jam, boil the fruit till wellreduced before adding the sugar.’ Eliza Acton's very good damson jam The fruit for…

The old theory about racing yachts was that it would be a lot less damaging if the owners sat fully clothed in the shower tearing up £50 notes. And nothing has ripped through the fortunes of ambitious rich men with quite the force 10 gale of the America’s Cup. First raced in 1851, it has lured those with the deepest pockets in pursuit of a piece of sporting silverware nicknamed the Auld Mug. The latest Briton to chuck money at the idea of coming up with a boat capable of being the fastest in the world is Sir Jim Ratcliffe. As if part-owning Manchester United and backing a Tour de France team were not enough of an ego ride, Sir Jim, since he got involved in 2018, has handed over…

Investment shouldn’t be exciting. Unless you are in it as an intellectual contact sport, slow and dull is the way to accumulate a sound portfolio. Luckily, one class of share has already done it for you, in the shape of investment trusts. These are ‘closed-ended’ portfolios of assets each chosen by a professional fund manager and put into a plc listed on the stock exchange. The balance of buyers and sellers determines the price. Investment funds, by contrast, are ‘open-ended’, where the price is determined by the manager’s dividing the number of issued units into the value of the portfolio. New units are issued to subscribers, or assets sold to meet demands of sellers. Investment advisers prefer these because they get a commission. There is nothing in it for them…

'La France est un paradis peuplé de gens qui se croient en enfer,’ said the writer Sylvain Tesson in 2017. France is a paradise populated by people who think they’re in Hell. It’s a quote that a friend, André, admires so much he has it inscribed on the wall of the shed where he keeps his large and elaborate model of the Tour de France. The Côte d’Azur of F Scott Fitzgerald, Katherine Mansfield and Cyril Connolly’s The Rock Pool (1947) has become overpopulated, expensive, glitzy and, in parts, ugly – forcing many holidaymakers deeper inland to the Var. Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence (1989) drew Brits away from Tuscany towards the Luberon. The result of this pincer movement is that the pretty village I’ve lived in for ten…

Is there anything you can’t leave home without? At least one volume of poetry and, as I’m Scottish, sunblock and sunglasses in any season. Is there something you really miss? I enjoy investing in being somewhere else. I quite enjoy missing people as long as I know I’m going to see them, and family always pitch up at some point when I’m away. Do you travel light? No, no… I do go away a lot, and when I’m packing the house looks like the scene of a terrible robbery. I talk myself through ‘What does 25 degrees feel like, and minus 3…?’ I really enjoy clothes, and I want the right thing for my mood. It’s nonsense, because I can’t possibly wear them all. And I look at my husband’s…

‘Eight ever, nine never’ means that when you have an eight-card fit missing the queen, you should ever (ie always) finesse; when you have a nine-card missing queen-lowlow-low, you should never finesse. It isn’t a favourite, implying a certainty when none exists. In particular, the odds when you’re missing four to the queen are extremely close. Inferences, even slender ones, from the bidding, lead and defence to date should swing you to finesse. Take this month’s deal from this year’s Camrose Trophy for home nations, won comfortably by England. West led the ace of spades and a second spade to East’s king. As declarer, you ruff East’s knave of spades at trick three. Plan the play. The a priori odds in hearts favour the drop. But there’s no rush. First,…

Ask Virginia Sorry – the easiest word Q I have fallen out with my daughter-in-law over a very trivial thing – I thought she owed me money when she didn’t. Now she’s pregnant and, following our argument, she says she doesn’t want me to have anything to do with the baby. Both my son and I are very distressed but obviously he has to take her side. What can I do? I’m beside myself. Name and address supplied A Money, to some people, particularly if they’ve been hard up, means a lot more than it does to others who are better off. And your almost accusing your daughter-inlaw of stealing money from you is a big, big thing. You cannot apologise enough. Say you can’t sleep for anguish over how…