Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2024 i The Oldie

Our much-loved deputy editor and patron saint of The Oldie, Jeremy Lewis, died in 2017, aged 75. In his memory, we run the Jeremy Lewis Prize, worth £500. It rewards the sort of writing that emulates Jeremy’s wit and lightness of touch in his books and journalism. What to write about In 400 words, recount a memory (similar to our Memory Lane column, on page 28 of this issue). Please begin by saying when the events you describe took place. How to send your entry Simply email your entry to editorial@theoldie.co.uk by 17th November 2024. Please mark it JEREMY LEWIS PRIZE.…

WHAT WAS segregated sea-swimming? Every week in the summer term at Berwick Grammar School, we had swimming lessons in the freezing North Sea. This ritual began for me in the late 1950s, when I was 11. There were two beach pools that filled on the incoming tide, and our lesson timetable was arranged accordingly. One pool was for women, the other for men. They were about 50 yards apart, each with a changing area carved into the cliff. Our Victorian ancestors believed men and women swimming together would lead to indecent behaviour. So separate bathing areas were established. This segregation was taken very seriously, and any transgressor would be fined. In the 19th century, female bathing costumes weren’t the fashionable items they are today. A lady would wear a smock-like…

Wedding invitations The wedding invitation arrives … and it’s worryingly thick – as thick as the kind of envelope you get when you’ve been accepted rather than rejected by a school, a university or a firm. It turns out to be a kind of welcome pack, with the first names of the bride and groom in italics on the front, containing eight separate information cards, stipulating everything from ‘gifts’ to ‘local hotels and hairdressers’ to ‘dress code’. One of the information cards, the most ominous of all, spells out the full timetable for the wedding. Absent are the reassuringly simple words ‘and afterwards at The Old Rectory’: those wonderfully open-ended words, with no time stipulations. You could just slip away from that ‘and afterwards at’ kind of wedding. Not from…

Sophia Waugh: School Days Sometimes I realise my pupils and I are from completely different worlds. Communication is blocked by this – sometimes disastrously. I am not talking about class, education or culture. I am talking about the totally different assumptions that operate in the minds of the young. I was first truly aware of this when my own children were young. My husband used to go to Pakistan for three months at a time, to work. We would explain to the children that ‘He has to go away to get the money to buy food.’ I thought that was all fine until I heard my eldest, aged five, describing Pakistan to a friend, and realised that she was describing the bank in Dulverton – just much bigger and very…

Mary Killen’s Beauty Tips Modern leggings made their first appearance in the 1960s. They were trousers similar to capri pants, but tighter. Capri pants were charming – think Audrey Hepburn – and are still charming today. It was when they morphed into leggings in increasingly tight, stretchy, machine-made polyamide fabric that the aesthetic problem began. Leggings disfigure even those with a justifiable reason for wearing them: personal trainers, professional athletes, ballet dancers. Yes, the wearer may have a technically perfect physique, but she wears them at the cost of offering Too Much Information. Leggings were a valuable addition to the human wardrobe in the days when they were largely unseen but served the key function, in the days before central heating, of providing warmth. For medieval men, they took the…

Postcards from the Edge Now comes the big life change: goodbye to being a punk grandma. For some years, I have dyed my hair purple, following some urge to capture an old-hippy look. But I suddenly grew tired of doing so, and decided to let the colour grow out. The change was met with dismay by my Deal coffee group, assembled at Bloody Mary’s each Saturday (where le tout Deal meets). ‘The purple takes years off your face,’ said one of my fellow oldies. ‘Don’t fade into grey!’ But hair colour is an affirmation of attitude, and I’m no longer in the mood for such a vivid choice -though I do know it cheers up onlookers. I remember a weary-looking older woman in Lebanon, when I visited Beirut a few…

At 4.45 on a midsummer morning, I was woken by something sounding like a strangulated crow. On looking out of the window, I saw 20 sheep, mixed in size and colour, happily grazing on the front lawn under two Indian smoke bushes in all their pink candyfloss glory. The view was very pretty and very funny. The (good) shepherd’s not being available at that early hour meant that two nuns, veils fluttering gently in the breeze, added to the surreal quality of the scene by shooing the trespassers back to their field, a mile away. Norfolk is full of sheep. It also has the highest concentration of churches in the world: there are 650 of them in the county. Many were built on the back of the wool trade. Four…

Frinton time-traveller SIR: Gyles Brandreth’s remark (October issue) that the joy of visiting Frinton in 2024 is that you feel as if you are in 1958 again reminded me of the saying that was common in Essex during the time I lived there: Harwich for the Continent, Frinton for the incontinent. The place was so staid it didn’t even have a pub. Could be it still doesn’t. Sincerely, Tony Purcell, Sheffield Prue's vibrant hues SIR: Bravo to Prue Leith (Prue’s News, October issue) for embracing – very elegantly – colourful clothes. Not so the motor industry, who have decided – maybe as a result of a wayward focus group or a batty influencer – to promote and sell cars that are grey or a dull beige. And the public seems…

It is strange that the years teach us patience; that the shorter our time, the greater our capacity for waiting. Elizabeth Taylor I have a new philosophy. I’m only going to dread one day at a time. Charles M Schulz, Snoopy cartoonist There are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds. G K Chesterton Most successes are unhappy. That’s why they are successes – they have to reassure themselves about themselves by achieving something that the world will notice. Agatha Christie I was born in London, and went to school in Scotland – I used to be dead tired when I got home at night. Norman Wisdom All the people like us are We, and everyone else is They. Rudyard Kipling I was educated once – it…

ROGER LEWIS Harold Wilson By Alan Johnson Swift £16.99 Harold Wilson, in his Gannex raincoat, was a pudgy, pipe-smoking target of TV impressionists – Mike Yarwood, for example, getting laughs by saying ‘the pound in your pocket’ and blinking his eyes very fast. (The other one Yarwood did was Edward Heath, heaving his shoulders.) Jason Watkins played Wilson in The Crown as a sort of croaking grey blob. In Alan Johnson’s trenchant study, Wilson is much bigger – more important – than these caricatures. He is ‘the first Prime Minister perceived as being of the modern age’, who set about ‘espousing the causes of modernity, efficiency and science against the sclerotic influence of the old-boy network’. Wilson put an end to Edwardiana -Alec Douglas-Home and Harold Macmillan in plus-fours on…

HUON MALLALIEU Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin By Sue Prideaux Faber £30 Hurrah! Sue Prideaux assesses Gauguin within the mores of the societies in which he lived rather than our own, and has no truck with an intellectual colonialism that seeks to appropriate the past. This is a grown-up and level-headed account of a flawed 19th-century genius, rather than the cancellation of a 21st-century bogeyman. In recent decades, Gauguin has been criticised as a matter of course for deserting his wife and for his several relationships with ‘under-age’ girls in Polynesia. As Sue Prideaux makes plain, in his marriage there was both love and fault on both sides. At 14 to 16, his Tahitian and Marquesan lovers were under-age neither in French eyes, where the age for marriage…

The ubiquitous comedian Romesh Ranganathan and his mum, Shanti, are the hosts of a new quiz show, Romesh Ranganathan’s Parents’ Evening (ITV). Ageing celebrities and their brightest child compete for a cash prize to be donated to charity. In advance of each round, the parent determines what they think their child will be capable of getting right and gambles accordingly. While the questions – such as naming boy bands or animal emojis – could be answered by the average ten-year-old, the ‘nepo babies’ are grown-ups. Some are even middle-aged. But will they meet their parents’ low expectations? How well, Romesh challenges us, do we really know our children? The show’s only appeal is to assess the child-rearing skills of the famous. Have they produced little madams, little monsters or mini-mes?…

The Belgians are a serious bunch of trencher-folk – possibly the most enthusiastic in Europe. Ruth van Waerbeek explains just how and why in a handsome hardback reprint of The Taste of Belgium, first published in 1996 – when we could all skip around the Continent without a care. Belgian food at home – rather than in the truffle-heavy expense-account restaurants of Brussels – is honest-to-goodness country cooking. It’s as good as anything rural and regional in France, but comes in German-size portions. Much of it is cooked with Belgian beer in slow-cooked stews – as with wine – with the same attention paid to the subtleties of flavour and fragrance appropriate to the dish. Rabbit with prunes in beer Farmed bunny is big in Belgium, rather more so than…

In June, Brighton appointed Fabian Hürzeler as their new manager. At 31, he is younger than six members of his playing squad. It’s becoming increasingly clear that football is no country for old men. Still, it would be unwise to say so to David Pleat, 79, a one-man barrier to the game’s tidal wave of youth. ‘I’m still here,’ says Pleat. ‘I have no intention of retiring. You’ll have to drag me off kicking and screaming.’ Turning 80 next January, he heads to matches at least three times a week. Across the country, you can spot him, up in the stands, notebook in hand. He isn’t there just as a spectator. He is applying his vast experience to locate the next generation of talent, passing on invaluable analysis to a…

Just as in everything else, there are fashions in investment. A very few observers can see these fashions emerging before the rest of us, and can make themselves rich as we stumble to get on board. As we buy, we don’t think we are joining a fashion trend. We think we have an insight to the future, and that today’s exciting new thing will become mainstream – at much higher prices than today. If you think this, you are probably fooling yourself. Fashions go as fast as they come. The most recent example is the dash for ESG, investments that ticked the boxes for Environment, Social and Governance compliance. This was so self-evidently a Good Thing that buyers assumed it would soon shine through to the bottom line. Not only…

What absolute joy it was first to go to Brodsworth, a lush and luxurious great empty house in Yorkshire that defies ordinary description. With its stupendously grand staircase, peopled by a multitude of statues and its strangely huge corridors, again filled with statues and giant mirrors, it has the most marvellous sense of a time long since gone. Its occupant was, when I visited, a memorable figure called Sylvia GrantDalton, who lived there all alone in silent isolation until her death in 1988, aged 89. One night, I lost my car keys and had to wait forlornly for a long time in the dark, standing under the porte cochère, knocking loudly over and over again. At last, a footfall sounded; those steps will never leave my mind, getting nearer and…

Ask Virginia I still send her flowers Q I have been a widower for nine years now. I buy flowers for the house every two weeks, usually alstroemerias. My wife always had them in the house. My buying flowers reminds me daily of her. There’s nothing soppy or silly about them. Your correspondent (September issue) should buy flowers for his wife while he is still able to. Jim B, Doncaster A I was so touched to read of this charming ritual. You sound like such a kind and sensitive man. I am sure this weekly reminder of the love you had – and still have – for your wife spreads itself to all your visitors and, if you believe your house has some kind of vibe, even in the bricks…

Swifties! Top of your Christmas book list this year is surely The 13 Days of Christmas by Taylor Garland (Hodder, £8.99). It’s a festive celebration for Taylor Swift Fans, or anyone aged nine to 13 who identifies as a girl. It’s crammed with Swifty morsels in a feast of selfies and other goodies. A different reader of the A new book same age may be thrilled for Swifties by the much-anticipated seventh volume in Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series: Wrath of the Triple Goddess (Puffin, £16.99) in which Percy, half-god, half-boy, saves the world yet again. For littlies, there’s a new story by the magnificent Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler which will warm the cockles of reader and readee alike. Jonty Gentaloo is the tale of a ‘plucky little penguin’.…

Algy Cluff (p14) was one of the first entrepreneurs to strike North Sea oil. He is author of Get On With It: A Memoir and The Importance of Being Algy. He owned the Spectator magazine. Simon Williams (p51) starred in Upstairs, Downstairs. He is Justin Elliott in The Archers. He and his wife, Lucy Fleming, play her parents, Peter Fleming and Celia Johnson, in Posting Letters to the Moon. Lady Antonia Fraser (p53) is one of our leading historians. At 92, she is The Oldie’s newest columnist. Patchwork Pieces, her latest book, is a collection of historical vignettes. It is out on 10th October. Harriet Rix (p74) worked in landmine clearance in Iraq and Syria. Her first book, Earth, Wind and Fire: How Trees Shaped the Elements and Mastered the…

Gyles Brandreth’s Diary When the great Sir John Gielgud died back in 2000, Dame Maggie Smith said, ‘We shall not see his like again. It is the end of an era.’ We shan’t see her like again, either. Maggie Smith was a one-off, unique and irreplaceable. It has been one of the privileges of my life to be able to call her a proper friend. I think she let me get close to her only because she knew I had been a friend of Kenneth Williams – her friendship with Kenneth was one of the unalloyed joys of her life. They didn’t simply sound alike. They were on the same wavelength. In the late 1950s, when they appeared together in the West End in Bamber Gascoigne’s revue Share My Lettuce,…

WHAT IS a crossword? A century ago, on 2nd November 1924, the Sunday Express published the first crossword in a British national newspaper. In the 1st July issue of Punch the next year it was declared unhesitatingly that the ‘dominant feature’ of British social life over the previous six months had been ‘the Cross-word puzzle’. Devised in America in 1913 by the Liverpool-born Arthur Wynne for the New York World, the cross-word (a printer’s error for word-cross) properly arrived in Britain with the publication in April 1924 of The Cross Word Puzzle Book. The British edition added a warning: THIS IS NOT A TOY. The following note asks ‘fathers and mothers, uncles and aunts’ to solve half a dozen of the puzzles themselves before passing the book on. ‘You’ll be…

Oh, I wish I’d looked after me teeth, And spotted the perils beneath. All the toffees I chewed, And the sweet sticky food, Oh, I wish I’d looked after me teeth. I wish I’d been that much more willin’ When I had more tooth there than fillin’ To pass up gobstoppers. From respect to me choppers, And to buy something else with me shillin’. When I think of the lollies I licked, And the liquorice all sorts I picked, Sherbet dabs, big and little, All that hard peanut brittle, My conscience gets horribly pricked. Oh I showed them the toothpaste all right, I flashed it about late at night, But up-and-down brushin’ And pokin’ and fussin’ Didn’t seem worth the time… I could bite! If I’d known, I was paving…

While he was teaching at Durham University in 1966, Jeremy Catto had chance encounter in a Newcastle pub that would spark a lifelong friendship. At the time, Bryan Ferry was a student at Newcastle University, studying fine art. He shared a flat with Stephen Buckley (pictured), who would go on to become a distinguished artist. Catto recalled, ‘I was having a drink in a low bar in the Bigg Market, the Royal Court, and they came in. ‘So we got drinking, and then we decided we’d go off to a nightclub in South Shields – which, typical of the North East in those days, turned out to be shut. And so we came back.’ Ferry remembers their first proper encounter at a gay pub in the city’s Bigg Market area,…

I first laid eyes on Jimi Hendrix on 15th February 1967 at the Dorothy Ballroom in Cambridge. Around 30 people turned up and we were all blown away by the maelstrom generated by Jimi, Mitch and Noel in that small venue without even a proper stage. The trio rocked the place and we were rendered numb by the onslaught. Jimi wrapped his long fingers around the Fender neck and made it talk in many tongues. I was with my old school pal Ricky Hopper, who had gained a scholarship to Jesus College in classics – and later discovered Kate Bush. I was ligging in Cambridge and was on my gap year – which, strange to say, has continued till this day. The Dorothy is now a Waterstones. Jimi had released…

Town Mouse Florentines are angry. Thanks to Airbnb, easyJet and the hyper-tourism they bring, fewer than 40,000 natives now live in the historic centre, compared with 100,000 in the Renaissance. And the 1.5 million tourists each year bring with them vulgarity, and offend the genteel people of this polite and beautiful city. In July this year, the BBC reported that a picture of a young woman kissing and embracing a statue of Bacchus in lewd fashion had been circulating, leading one Florentine to comment, ‘This is the result of years of attempts at turning Florence into Disneyland.’ This may be unfair: perhaps she been inspired by the Cynic philosopher Diogenes and his habit of embracing statues. I do hope the statue-embracer wasn’t a Brit. That would be embarrassing. We English…

The Reverend Lucy Winkett, Rector of St James’s Church, Piccadilly, led the memorial service for A S Byatt, the novelist. There were tributes from Edmund de Waal, the potter and author of The Hare with the Amber Eyes, and by Isabel Armstrong, read by Isabel Pinner. Jenny Uglow and Lawrence Norfolk gave eulogies. Edmund de Waal said, ‘So remember A S and joy, remember her response to her portrait by Patrick Heron: “When it was finished, I did not know what to think for a moment. We both stared. I had a curious experience of it settling into shape, becoming itself, as I looked at it. The energy, the brashness, the uncompromising splashes of primary colour represented what I had wanted in an abstract portrait by a great colourist… They…

History Edward II had Piers Gaveston and Hugh Despenser. Elizabeth I had the Earl of Leicester, Sir Christopher Hatton and the Earl of Essex, among others. In France, you can take your pick from Louis XI’s barber Olivier Le Daim – the man for whom the term ‘judge, jury and executioner’ was first coined – to Louis XIII’s eminence rouge, Cardinal Richelieu. The favourite, a monarch’s personal friend, was often raised from obscurity to a position of wealth and, crucially, power. It had a golden age in the 16th and 17th centuries. But it is a widespread enough historical phenomenon, from classical times to our own, that it might be more accurate to call it a part of human nature. Rulers need friends. And naturally many look for someone to…

I am not a big party person. My dad once went to a wedding and got so flustered by arrival-line etiquette that he kissed the groom’s father. It’s a Welsh thing. Hearty back-slapping, please. No mwahs for the Cymry. And if I am wary of hellos, I can’t abide goodbyes. Nobody can. Why the hell can’t we just say ‘Ta-ra’ and go? What is this extended departure gavotte? My wife is so saintly that she can’t leave without a farewell hug for everyone in the room. I can go home, switch off the security systems, feed the cat, read all my emails and come back to the party to find she hasn’t got halfway through her chatty valedictions. Do people really require this prolonged farewell? Of course, you have to pay…

SIMON WILLIAMS A Piece of Work: Playing Shakespeare and Other Stories By Simon Russell Beale Abacus £25 Twenty-five years ago, Russell Beale told his publisher this biography would ‘never happen’. Let us rejoice he changed his mind so quickly. This dazzling book is a new must-read for theatre aficionados on both sides of the footlights. In Noël Coward’s recent biography, Masquerade, there is a similar work ethic; a dedication to truth and understatement – the less-is-more mantra. ‘Naturalism is a shifting and receding target,’ Russell Beale writes. ‘Garrick was as truthful as Burton, Sarah Siddons as Dench.’ I wonder. Lesser showbusiness memoirs chug along as if dictated in a Winnebago; not this one. Russell Beale’s writing is effortlessly eloquent and intriguing – full of colour, clarity and panache. Like his…

DANIEL HANNAN Jeremy Catto: A Portrait of the Quintessential Oxford Don By David Vaiani Unicorn £25 As the college’s Senior Dean, Jeremy Catto (1939-2018) once had to fine an Oriel man who, intending to impress his inamorata, had clambered into Hertford after hours. The undergraduate was unlucky in his choice of window, and managed to fall into the bed of Hertford’s principal, Geoffrey Warnock, who was occupying it at the time alongside his fellow philosopher (and wife) Mary Warnock. The Oriel man tried to pass himself off as ‘Tom Smith from Iffley’, but the philosophers were not fooled – among other things, they thought that Tom Smith from Iffley would not have tied his own bow tie – and the poor chap ended up wretchedly having to explain himself to…

Almeida Theatre, London, until 23rd November Kenneth Tynan said he could not love anyone who did not want to see Look Back in Anger. I would find it very hard to love someone who wanted me to watch this infuriating play again. My loathing for Look Back in Anger dates back only to last night, when I saw it performed on stage for the first time in 40 years. This new-found hatred came as a complete surprise to me – before I watched this adept revival, I had fond memories of John Osborne’s most famous play. What’s changed? Well, partly, I have. Osborne’s fierce domestic drama seemed daring and thrilling when I first saw it in my teens. Seeing it again in my fifties, I found it trite and gratuitously…

I’ve just returned from the Oldie trip to Istanbul, Troy and Gallipoli. Banish from your minds (and palates) any idylls about Suleyman’s banquets or Agamemnon slaying 56 oxen. It’s the Age of Erdoğan, which gastronomically translates as the age of the meatball and excessively expensive wine. Around £65 for the cheapest wines on the list to exploit us infidels. Wherever we went, the mighty kofta was dropped onto our plates, whether in a motorway caff or at the Matbah, a posh gaffe not 100 yards from Suleyman’s kitchens at the Topkapi Palace, which alone are the size of the old GLC. I wish I could tell you where you can find the best kofta, but I can’t – a good kofta in Turkey is an oxymoron, unless you count the…

Land Rover MOT last week. Passed again, although this time with an advisory: new exhaust centre and rear would soon be needed. She’s 31 years old with 136,000 miles on the clock, of which 5,000 were since the previous MOT. During that year, I’d fitted a new battery (£108), a new door seal (£11.50 plus £6 postage), a new driver’s door-lock striker (£12.95) and a new door-hinge gasket (£0.49). The new exhaust parts were £118 delivered. Not bad for an old girl. I’ve had her three and a half years, covering the same mileage each year, and she’s yet to fail an MOT. Parts in previous years included a new starter motor (£90), wiper blades (£18.92) and speedo cable (£4.52). I’m lucky to have the help of an excellent mechanic,…

Taking a Walk Beginnings are often tentative, awkward and riddled with doubt. And so it was with this walk, which began in a Morrisons car park in a shabbier corner of Ross-on-Wye. I had devised a two-hour walk guided by my new best friend, the Ordnance Survey app, and this was not the scenic start I’d envisaged. I headed up Brampton Road, out of Ross, a lovely but not-too-twee Wye-side town, cars accelerating noisily up the hill. The suburbs were full of hanging baskets and privet hedges in front of handsome local-authority semis, and the occasional tetchy household sign. ‘Don’t even think of parking here,’ read one. This was not a street where parking was at a premium. The road soared over the busy Ross bypass, linking middle England to…

The opening lead is the most influential card of the 52 played. And it’s unique -the only card played without a sight of dummy. Often (mostly, even), your aim is to avoid giving away a trick. But sometimes you can create something out of nothing – as was the case on this month’s deal from the Provost Spring Foursomes. 1. Game-forcing spade raise – the Jacoby convention. 2. Natural second suit in a non-minimum hand. 3. No slam interest. Four spades went down at only one table – the one where West found the diabolical opening lead of the two of spades. Declarer beat East’s knave with the ace and tried a club to the queen -even if the finesse lost, he could discard two diamonds on the ace-queen. East…

For her Lucky dip slippers These comfortable, handcrafted Onaie slippers, plush with soft shearling, are handmade and embroidered in the Polish Highlands by skilled craftswomen. Onaie was founded by two Polish sisters, to bring Polish folk heritage and artisan techniques to the UK. No two pairs are the same. £22 notonthehighstreet.com Merino wool tank No discerning woman will ever complain about receiving a gift from Aspiga, and its clothing and footwear sourced from around the world already have a firm following. These round-necked short tanks are made from sustainable merino wool in a variety of delectable colours. £95 www.aspiga.com Pooky rechargeable table lamps Not cheap, but if you calculate a lifetime of candles, the numbers make sense. These rechargeable lamps are popular in restaurants but these come with much nicer…

Somebody once phoned Anthony Burgess to wish him a Happy Christmas. ‘Liana!’ he yelled to his wife, ‘It’s Christmas!’ He hadn’t noticed – which says a lot about the great novelist’s powers of observation. But for the rest of us, Christmas commences or re-commences five minutes after the boxes of tinsel and glass baubles have finally been stowed back in the loft. It’s a year-round festival. You can’t avoid it. January is spent returning cardigans to Marks, complaining about malfunctioning stocking-fillers in Toys-R-Us (or its equivalent), and whimpering about the credit card bill, which has to be settled early in the month. The council refuses to dispose of the tree, which languishes on the pavement, a brown skeleton, until the spring. No doubt, despite warnings, many a family is trying…

Rachel Johnson finds debobbling her jumpers therapeutic. ‘I have invested in a batterypowered jersey debobbler. It is very satisfying and therapeutic to use. It gobbles those telltale bobbles on the wool like nobody’s business.’ From £14.59. swiss-store.co.uk Rowley Leigh depends on his trusty potato-peeler. ‘I’m not really a great fan of gadgetry in the kitchen. My drawers are replete with bits and pieces, such as a cavatelli roller, used once before being consigned to oblivion. Is a potato peeler a gadget? To me, it is an essential piece of equipment and I am always amazed in holiday houses, or even in other people’s houses, that I can never find one. Of course, if you can’t be arsed to peel a potato, an apple or an aubergine or run a peeler…

Overgrown grass to be cut back Walden Local Seafood festival success despite ‘biblical’ rain Dorset Echo Tower crane is dismantled Peeblesshire 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…

Grumpy Oldie Man ‘I’m not going to beg you,’ said my wife one recent evening when I was visiting her at her picturesque thatched cottage in a rural Dorset village, ‘because I value my dignity. I am going to gently request that you rein the hysteria in.’ I commented on neither the split infinitive nor the sentence-ending preposition. Becca’s tone plainly implied that this would be very much the kind of archaic pedantry up with which she had extremely little intention of putting. What I did was point out that 33 years of holy wedlock (the last dozen insulated by a buffer zone of 104 miles and five or six counties) had surely taught her how eerily calm I become in a genuine crisis. ‘All I will say,’ I went…

Michael Stoop (1922-2010) won the Sword of Honour at Sandhurst and the Military Cross while serving in the Grenadier Guards in France in 1944. A member of the celebrated Anglo-Dutch Rugger family, prominent shareholders in Royal Dutch Shell, he was possessed of immense charm and intelligence. After the war, he elected to live the gambler’s life: trading commodities or playing backgammon in the 1950s. The centre of activity was the St James’s Club at 106 Piccadilly, where there was a room containing six backgammon tables. It was in constant use from 5pm onwards, every weekday, until John Aspinall’s Clermont Club superseded the St James’s in the mid-1960s. Prominent among the St James’s backgammon coterie, along with Stoop, was Rupert Belville, a professional backgammon player. He made his living travelling the…

In late 1959, Jack Hawkins was a worried man. Britain’s most famous stiff-upper-lipped hero – and star of The Cruel Sea (1953), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Ben-Hur (1959) and Zulu (1964)– was suffering from a persistent, vicious cough. Across three decades, he’d appeared in nearly 50 films and countless stage shows – yet never clocked a single day sick. However, as his cough worsened during the filming of The League of Gentlemen (1960), the cast witnessed some heart-wrenching moments, as Jack grappled with his loss of voice. Under a veil of silence – so as not to alarm potential employers – Hawkins was wheeled into a London clinic for cobalt treatment. His voice was restored, but in a noticeably huskier monotone. Should the cancer return, doctors warned,…

Oldie Man of Letters The metropolitan elite – who ushered both Tony Blair and David Cameron into Number 10 – are once again in the ascendant. I could see it long before the election, because I have turned into one of those old people who totter to book launches in London at 6.30 in the evening. Most of those who attend such gatherings belong to what is called the metropolitan elite, though I do not think I do so myself – not exactly. Or have I gone native without realising it? A few weeks before the election, I found myself standing on a landing, holding a glass of plonk, with Tristram Hunt, Director of the V&A and former Labour MP; Jane Bonham-Carter, Liberal peer; and Robert Harris, the popular novelist…

In my 36 years as a policeman, one incident is seared into my brain in forensic detail above all the others. It was during the gorgeous summer of 1969 when, having completed basic training, I was posted to Dunstable in Bedfordshire. On this particular Saturday morning, they’d let me loose in full uniform to patrol the town centre. I should have had a senior constable with me, but he was on leave and there was a shortage of staff. So the duty sergeant took a risk and sent me out to ‘wave the flag’. Armed with a Pye Pocketfone two-way radio, which I’d never used before, off I went on my first foot patrol down a high street I’d never been down before. What could possibly go wrong? I remember…

Country Mouse Starmer has spoken. Britons must ‘turn up our collars and face the storm’. Perhaps he imagines it will be only higher-rate taxpayers, such as plumbing king Charlie Mullins, who will jump ship. I predict that even his favoured ‘hard-working families’ will also be looking for ways of escaping the nasal knight’s self-avowed ‘unpopular decisions’. I am already dreaming of decamping to my newly-beloved Liguria. During late summer, my elder daughter, tiring of my grumbling, frogmarched me out of my comfort zone in Wiltshire and onto taxis, trains, planes and hired automobiles. I went along with it, obeying her orders – I had to. I am digitally excluded and she had the boarding cards on her phone. After a 13-hour journey, I found myself deep in the heart of…

I think I suffer from follower envy. My TV colleagues have trillions of followers on social media, while I plod along in their wake with a few thousand. I feel like an also-ran, and constantly tell myself I should do something about it. But, oh, the tedium of it! To be constantly taking snaps of your dinner, doing a selfie in Diana pose in front of the Taj Mahal, cuddling the dog or stepping onto the Oxford Tube! I admit to quite like videoing the odd kitchen hack – how to chop an onion or how to avoid ending up in A&E with ‘avocado hand’ after trying to remove the stone. But even that’s a fag, because it seems I need to be ‘on message’ to do it, ie earrings,…

The Doctor’s Surgery I remember the days in England when olive oil was regarded as a medicinal product, used mainly for softening the wax in the external ear. You went to the chemist to buy a small bottle of it and treated it as if it were an exotic substance or even dangerous. It belonged in the medicine chest rather than in the larder. As food, it was in that then capacious category, ‘foreign muck’. What was wrong with lard or beef dripping, anyway? Who says that there has been no progress? Olive oil might return, at least metaphorically, to the medicine chest, so good is it claimed to be for you. Nothing we consume can long escape epidemiological investigation of its consequences, good or bad, for our health. Those…

If it’s important to convey beauty, then it is equally important (and arguably rather more fun) to convey the ugly side of life. In other words, wickedness. But it is perfectly possible that your wicked is my wonderful. In the wild terrain of wicked plots, a profound disagreement can exist not only between the plotters at the time, but between historians and other commentators ever since. The Gunpowder Plot of 1605 is a perfect example. As a Protestant child (I was converted, emulating my mother, when I was 13), I thought I knew everything about the Gunpowder Plot. As a Catholic, I tried to persuade people not to burn or torture Guy Fawkes -although it could be tricky in wartime, when almost everything seemed worthy of being pitched into the…

The strain in Spain PENNY PHILLIPS Gabriel’s Moon By William Boyd Viking £20 Why can’t Gabriel Dax sleep? When his doctor – who’s been prescribing him sleeping pills for years – asks if he’s ever considered psychoanalysis, Gabriel insists that ‘there’s no mystery here – I know exactly why I can’t sleep… There’s nothing for anyone to explain to me.’ Gabriel’s self-analysis harks back to a cataclysmic childhood event – with which Gabriel’s Moon opens. And, transcending even Hollywood film producer Sam Goldwyn’s preference for ‘a story that starts out with an earthquake and works its way up to a climax’, the ensuing 250-odd pages deliver a non-stop spiral of action. Recognising that he can’t go on leading ‘the onerous half-life of an insomniac’, Gabriel embarks on a course of…

What do mimics do these days? Rory Bremner gave us his Trump voice – almost too easy, like Boris. He nailed poor Keir Starmer – apologetic, earnest, adenoidal. Bremner’s Trump claimed to have known Keir Hardie (‘loved his films – such good films with Stan Laurel, beautiful films’) and to have advised Hadrian to build his wall – ‘That’s what I told Hadrian and he did put up a wall, a beautiful wall.’ That was on Broadcasting House, which does its Sunday best to lighten a conflicted, war-torn world. Michael Berkeley’s Private Passions had interesting choices from Lucian Msamati, currently in Waiting for Godot. Having once turned down the part of Othello, he’d rather like to play Juliet. ‘A barrel-chested, deep-voiced man of African origin,’ he laughed, ‘playing a lovestruck…

‘My ex-wife left me again. She’s a tennis player. Love means nothing to her.’ A hopelessly lame gag but, in Bob Dylan World, it’s legendary – because he rarely speaks onstage. He just trots out a series of often unrecognisable songs and there’s precious little to distinguish that performance from any other. But, one night in the 1990s, he told that joke and the people who were there still talk about it. Because it’s what musicians say, not what they play, that’s often more memorable. Ray Davies and James Taylor both toured a few years ago with shows where they explained how and why they wrote their greatest hits before singing them – unforgettably magical – and you could already sense the words-to-music ratio starting to shift. Taylor even had…

I haven’t had much luck with growing plums. After one old tree died, we planted another Victoria perhaps too close to the site of the previous one. The blossom was hit by frost – the tree never really got going and was producing very few fruit in its second and third years. I’m not sure whether it was self-fertile. If I try again, I shall plant the tree, possibly one of the gages, against a south-facing wall. Old Green Gage is a very reliable sweet variety; bare-root trees are available from late November. Gages came originally from the Middle East; it was Sir William Gage who introduced them from France in the 18th century and gave the plums their name. I was enjoying the fruit last month in Amiens, where…

Winemaker Dermot Sugrue is, according to his wife, Ana, ‘the Don Corleone of English wine’. Ana is also an accomplished winemaker, and she knows of whom she speaks. I first tasted the fruits of Sugrue’s labours 20 years ago, when he was the winemaker at Nyetimber. In his peripatetic career thereafter, he has tipped his trademark flat cap at a host of English wineries – with offers that, it seems, they haven’t been able to refuse. I was reminded of this on a recent jaunt to Wiston Estate, Pip and Harry Goring’s beautiful patch of Sussex. Their equally delightful winery has nurtured not just their own-label wines, but also releases from Black Dog Hill, Jenkyn Place and Digby, among others. Almost all the Wiston wines I tasted had been made…

What a marketing masterstroke to call the internet ‘the cloud’. It has a reassuring sense of non-threatening technology, administered by some sort of supranational and beneficent United Nations. The truth is very different; the internet relies on a monumental amount of physical infrastructure, almost all of it privately owned. You may not realise how important, and abundant, undersea cables are. They carry more than 95 per cent of global internet traffic. This includes trillions of financial transactions every day, as well as your emails. When someone tells you that satellites are the backbone of the internet, smile knowingly. It’s underwater cables that are doing the work. Perhaps, like me, you are old enough to remember the excitement of the first transatlantic telephone lines in the 1960s. They seemed almost magical.…

Do you travel light? I never did, but my husband’s incredibly bossy about travelling light – so I’ve learnt to pack just carry-on luggage. But I can’t just have a very neat bag and a backpack. I have about a million satellite bags with things trailing out of them. What’s your favourite destination? It’s a house in Italy that my dad (John Mortimer) and mum used to visit every summer. My dad died 15 years ago, and we went back only in the last couple of years. It really reminds me of my childhood and of him. It’s down a very precipitous dusty track near Siena, with wild boars and vipers. What are your earliest childhood holiday memories? The South of France – a magical place owned by Tony Richardson…

IN COMPETITION No 311 you were invited to write a poem called Apple Pie. There was a glut of tasty entries, though I was rather shocked by the sentimentality of some. Bruce Maunder Taylor, however, in a more Rabelaisian spirit, recounted an aerial battle of apple pies engaging with magpies and flying pigs. Back at the table, Vivienne Woods described a moment of tasting: ‘Ugh! his appetite had abated/ She had used a garlic tainted knife,/ A taste he really hated.’ Commiserations to them and to Erika Fairhead, Peter Jarvis, William Wood, Julie Wigley, Catherine Cooper, I White, Mike Morrison, Iris Bull, Rob Salamon, D A Prince and Jane Moth, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going…

When folk royalty Richard and Linda Thompson released I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight in 1974, you wouldn’t have got short odds they’d both be making records 50 years later, but this spring saw a pair of solo albums and each a pure delight. Richard’s Ship To Shore – from the two-way radio he had as a child – is a suitably windswept and choppy electric folk adventure powered by his stinging guitar and 18th century vocal tones. His ex-wife Linda can’t sing anymore sadly, thanks to a longtime larynx condition. Proxy Music, its cover a cheeky pastiche of the first Roxy album, is a selection of her best, most wistful and chiming tunes sung – proxy! – by various disciples, among them Rufus Wainwright, her son Teddy,…

Art Membership of an art gallery usually means you can avoid the tedious business of advance booking online and be spontaneous. A Tate membership doesn’t only give unlimited free entry to exhibitions at Tate Modern and Tate Britain (and their excellent members-only cafés) but also to associated galleries in Liverpool and St Ives. You also get a glossy quarterly magazine. From £78 tate.org.uk It’s a similar deal at the Royal Academy where free entry includes the mammoth Summer Exhibition. From £138 royalacademy.org.uk And for the aficionado, a subscription to The Art Newspaper makes an excellent gift. It’s a serious monthly (with daily updates online) covering all the visual arts plus how they are affected by laws, politics, economics and culture. £94 print and digital theartnewspaper.com Gardening What’s not to like…

We aging or disabled gardeners are blessed with an array of new products to make lighter work of our horti endeavours. To my modest Christmas list, I’ve added DeWalt’s cordless pruner – essentially batterypowered secateurs. There are several models enabling my benefactor(s) to spend as much or as little as they like. The basic pruner (around £100 but go online for offers) gives 1,000 cuts per charge and weighs less than a big bag of sugar. I dislike garden hoses. They snag, are never quite long enough and are a struggle to keep tidy and put away. So, thinking ahead to summer days less wet than this year’s, I’ve acquired an Oumuik foldable watercarrying bag that holds a thousand litres (220 gallons in old money) that sits comfortably in a…

1 Which month is also a 1978 song by Earth, Wind and Fire, a 1987 film by Woody Allen and a 1990 novel by Rosamund Pilcher? 2 If Corfu is the noun, what is the adjective? 3 Peter Mandelson and Jimmy Savile. What nickname did they both give their mothers? 4 In the 1997 film The Devil’s Advocate, Al Pacino plays Satan in the form of a New York lawyer. His character shares his name — forename and surname -with a 17th-century English poet. What name might that be? 5 Who was the first politician to be given an audience with Donald Trump after he became President in 2016? 6 In which book, covering ten years of elapsed time, are chronicled the following: the Great Plague, the Great Fire of…