Innholdsfortegnelse for February 2025 i The Oldie

I can't sleep. Of course, I can sleep and I do sleep, but not necessarily in the right place at the right time. I have no difficulty nodding off in church or at the cinema – at our local deluxe flea-pit, they even provide beds for the purpose. My problem is overnight slumber. I get to sleep pretty quickly once the light goes out and then I am out for the count for three hours at least; often for four and a half. (My sleep pattern, like yours, runs in 90-minute cycles.) And then I wake up in need of a wee. I got into the habit of nocturnal micturition when our children were small. My wife explained to me that it's one of the downsides of having children. And…

WHAT IS a dudebro? The dudebro is no mere dude and no mere bro. He is a dudebro. You may feel that's tautologous, but there is a subtle difference between a ‘dude’ and a ‘bro’. A dude is excessively concerned with his looks. A bro is excessively invested in his masculinity. The dudebro combines the worst elements of each. He likes to drink beer, play video games, harass women in bars and beep you when you slow down for pedestrians. He works out, has tattoos and dresses in such a way that you will notice this. His interests include protein shakes, Bitcoin, PornHub, Joe Rogan and the Ultimate Fighting Championship. He won't hear a word against Elon Musk. He hates the woke new Jaguar advert – it offends him to…

My mother was once stopped for soliciting as she sat in her car outside a house in Kensington, all dressed up, waiting to go to a party. She explained to the policeman she was congenitally punctual. Arriving on the dot or even early was an occupational hazard. Luckily, being of the same persuasion, he let her go. That was in the sixties, but the notion of arriving anywhere on time persisted in being as uncool in the eighties when I was a young woman about town. Then, if you were asked to drinks, the time was 6.30pm and no one who wasn't a total dweeb would be seen dead arriving before 7 at the earliest. Same with dinners when invitations stated ‘8 for 8.30’. Who ever arrived before nine, or…

Reasonable wife-beating. Reasonable Jew-baiting. Reasonable racism. Reasonable physical or verbal abuse of homosexuals. The placing of the word ‘reasonable’ in front of these words is an immediately recognisable nonsense. Yet ‘reasonable chastisement’ of children is still permissible under English law – though not in Scotland or Wales. It seems quite extraordinary that the law, which has gone so far in the last half-century towards protecting the person, and the sensitivities, of groups perceived to be vulnerable, should still permit the most obviously vulnerable – babies and small children – to be beaten. As someone who was regularly beaten until I bled, from the age of seven or eight onwards, and threatened with beatings by my father – who did indeed thrash my elder brother – I take exception to the…

I have a new hobby, which is in danger of becoming an addiction. It was passed on to me by a colleague of whom I am rather in awe. She is young enough to be my daughter. Well, most of the department has that distinction nowadays. But it is glorious in its old-school approach, especially to bad behaviour. New classes, seeing her young, blonde prettiness, make the mistake of assuming she will be a pushover. Not a chance. The hobby is scouring what are called ‘activities’ on our Class Charts page. Class Charts is the app on which you take registers, note misbehaviour, award good behaviour, look up the children's addresses etc. It also has a button called ‘activities’, within which is a choice called ‘negative behaviour only’, wherein lie…

Even a confirmed and committed urbanite like Town Mouse needs a jaunt to the countryside every now and then. So it was that, feeling a little jaded following a non-stop round of parties, I took myself off for the weekend to visit my father, Grandpa Mouse. When I was a little mouse, Grandpa Mouse found God and moved to a spiritual retreat near the dreaming spires of Oxford. Each morning, he and his 20 or so white-clad fellow residents – both men and women – get up at 4am for meditation. They live in a Palladian mansion built in 1756 by the Harcourt family, who were descended from Norman invaders. The house is on the bank of the Thames. It boasts a boathouse, family chapel, grotto, orangery, Tudor grave, ancient…

It's a pleasant thought to me that my parents were married in 1925. How fascinating the arc of generational history can be. They perhaps didn't imagine they'd have any offspring living (so far!) 100 years later. My father was born in the faraway time of 1877 – I still have his passport issued after the First World War for the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. As a young lad, he saw the Home Rule leader Charles Stewart Parnell, and as a young man met Anna Pavlova. If a chap in his sixties fathers a child this year, it's sweet to think he may have a child living, who still remembers him, a century hence. Whenever I get the chance to nip across the Channel, from Deal to France…

My New Year's Resolution? I must not show off. Join me? ‘Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training. They do it to get a crown that will not last, but we do it for a crown that will last for ever.’ (1 Corinthians 9:25) St Paul was no stranger to the Olympic Games, nor was he disapproving of them as such – they were as much part of his life as they are of ours. And he was no stranger to strict training, something he favoured both for himself and for his followers. What he stresses is the desirability of thinking beyond keeping physically fit – to a frame of mind that subjects all our behaviour and our whole being to the discipline that will turn us…

The Oldie v Le Vieux SIR: I was an English teacher in Denmark for many years (I'm Danish). Now, at 73, I subscribe to your great magazine, and I love and adore it. Just for fun, I have compared it with its Danish ‘sister’, Ældresagen (The Old People's Mag), and to the French Vieux (Old)… Tell you what: Your Danish sister is all about stairlifts, tight stockings, vitamins, exercise and that sort of practical thing … plus about where to get a discount strictly for the old. The Oldie, well, you know it, full of humour, visits to manor houses, philosophical musings, celebs, interesting memories etc. Delightful! Do you know what your French sister is about? It is … of course … almost entirely about AMOUR! How to go on…

A perfect opportunity to visit some of the most renowned gardens of the Côte d'Azur, with Kirsty Fergusson, who led our trip in 2015. Kirsty has persuaded old friends to open their garden gates. So, we will be visiting the Hanbury Botanic Garden with Caroline Hanbury, the Gardens of Villa Ephrussi de Rothschild at Cap Ferrat, Eze, the Maeght Foundation at St Paul-de-Vence, Monaco, Menton, Grasse and Valbonne. And we will end at the Matisse Museum – before lunch at La Petite Maison. We will be staying at the Hotel Napoleon in the heart of Menton, and every evening we will have dinner at Restaurant Port Garavan, which looks out onto the Mediterranean. ITINERARY Thursday 19th June Depart Gatwick on BA 2572 at 10.15; arrive Nice at 13.20. Welcome drinks…

Constellations and Consolations By Sarah Sands Austin Macauley Publishers £14.99 This book is drenched in tears, but it isn't soppy. It is a tribute to the author's dead brother, Kit Hesketh-Harvey (1957-2023), best known from his cabaret act Kit and the Widow. The routine was hardly Flanders and Swann. The evening would begin with wittily constructed lyrics, seemingly designed to appeal to middle-class, middle-minded audiences, but pretty soon you knew that, somewhere along the line, things were going to get out of hand. Part of the joy of a Kit and the Widow concert was the discomfort of the audience wondering whether it was all right to laugh at material that gradually became more and more smutty and/or off-limits for other reasons. I usually take it as a bad sign…

Soup! There are times in the depths of winter when nothing else will do. A thick, comforting bowlful of what granny – your own or someone else's – used to make. Curl up by the fire with Anne-Katrin Weber's deliciously warming Greens & Beans – originally published in Germany, where a main-course soup followed by a substantial dessert is the traditional midday meal. Uninhibited spicings and imaginative finishings make all the difference. Haricot beans with celeriac are finished with a pine-nut gremolata that includes olives, lemon zest and chilli. Black-eyed beans with cabbage flavoured with ginger and garlic are served with a dollop of coconut yoghurt. German Spätzle – squiggly flour-and-egg dumplings that look like pasta – are served with an Italianate lentil stew, finished with balsamic vinegar. For a…

When I was a teenager, one thing used to sustain me through the dark nights of January and February. In bed, I'd plunge under the covers with my transistor radio and tune into Test Match Special. I'd listen for hours to crackly coverage of Illingworth, Edrich and Snow battling away in Brisbane, Bangalore and the Basin Reserve, the dulcet tones of Brian Johnston and John Arlott transporting me to places of exoticism and glamour. The next morning at school, bleary-eyed, we cricket fans would gather and compare how long we had stayed the course. Did you make it through to stumps? We'd ask. And even if you hadn't, you'd claim you had. However bright those memories are, I now realise there is something false about them. Not least because it…

Congratulations to Beatrice. In case you don't know her, she's a wind farm in the North Sea. Just before Christmas, she joined the select band of wind farms to receive more than £1 billion in subsidies from the taxpayer. She's been whirring away for seven years, and at this rate we will pay the £2.2 billion cost of the farm by 2031. Not a bad return on someone's investment, then, at the taxpayer's expense. The subsidies are paid through a magnificently complex series of steps. If you want to see how it is done, go to Eigen Values on Substack (warning: contains some financially upsetting scenes) because the Government won't tell you. Neither will it admit that the fiction of cheap offshore wind has made the UK's electricity prices the…

I was forewarned about the view. But it was still the best kind of shock when I parked beside a forbidding set of barns and climbed out of the car. I had driven up the hill from the fabulously named village of Bumble's Green in south-west Essex. And there, beyond the disused farmyard and a weedy bank of earth, was an almost aerial view of London. Everything was laid out below: the Shard and the cluster of pinnacles that marked the City, along with the Telecom Tower and the London Eye. In the near distance was the bright, shiny rectangle of the Spurs stadium. To the west was the arch of Wembley. It was like being on a ledge, peering down at the city, which looked misty and calm in…

Robert Bathurst (p15) plays Jeff Bernard in Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell at the Coach & Horses, Soho, in January. He was in Cold Feet, Toast of London, Downton Abbey and the remake of Dad's Army. Kathy Lette (p21) is a writer. Her novels include Puberty Blues (1979) and The Revenge Club (2024). Her non-fiction includes In Bed With… (2009) and Men: A User's Guide (2010). Griff Rhys Jones (p22) was in Not the Nine O'Clock News. He was in Alas Smith and Jones with Mel Smith. TalkBack, his company, produced Da Ali G Show, I'm Alan Partridge and QI. Kate Garner (p34), a songwriter and singer, is the daughter of Chas Hodges from Chas & Dave. She presents The Stories Behind the Songs on Talking Pictures TV.…

In the way of this dismal age for the young, my son, Louis Norman, has been restored to his childhood home for some 16 months. This is less by choice than through economic necessity. No one within 17 postcodes of sanity, let alone a close relative, would wish to cohabit with me. For all that, I think he finds it almost tolerable. He and his partner have turned the previously condemnable top floor of the house into a pleasant apartment. And while he naturally finds his old man a loud and narcissistic nuisance, there are occasional beacons of amusement to light the path. Often, these revolve round the mishandling of food. He christened one of my creations ‘blood pork’, for example, after a self-inflicted knife wound liberally seasoned the batch…

I've got an occasional residency in a Soho pub. For the last few years, I've turned up behind the bar at the Coach & Horses in Greek Street to perform Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell to a paying public. The play, taken from Bernard's weekly Spectator column, ‘Low Life’, was collated and constructed into a theatre show by Keith Waterhouse. He set it in the Coach, where Bernard would begin his day at opening time, 11am. Starting in 1989, the show ran profitably in the West End, starring Peter O'Toole. It makes sense to perform it in situ; doing the play there makes the pub echo, if a bit incoherently, with history. James Hillier, the director, cut the piece to just one hour long and has me doing it on my…

If we send dogs to training school, why not husbands, too? Imagine having a hubby who was always pleased to see you, heeled when called, fetched, remained loving and loyal at all times and, best of all, was house-trained. I do all my research in a scientific, in-depth fashion – over cocktails with girlfriends. And what I've gleaned is that most of them are not having sex with their husbands. Why? Because they're fed up with doing all the chores. Giving a room a sweeping glance is the closest most men ever come to housework, besides leaving a roasting pan to soak and looking thoughtfully at the washing-up now and then. When a woman has worked all day and comes home to cook dinner, help with homework, find the lost…

In spring 1983, I was living in New York, failing to become a great Anglo-American novelist. A local friend had worked as a secretary to the author John Cheever, who had died a year earlier. Now he, the friend, was organising an informal wake at a bar across town called The Guardsman, where the deceased had often come to linger of an evening. The first thing I noticed when I arrived was a middle-aged man seated on a high stool at a table in the middle of the room, his tiny legs dangling down short of the floor. He was wearing rumpled grey trousers and what looked suspiciously like a blue crested school blazer. Five or six young people were standing attentively around him. ‘Truman,’ my friend hissed in my…

Talking about how cold you are is boring. But even if you have been stripped of your winter fuel allowance, there is no need to be a martyr to shivering. Oldie-readers may recall the scratchy Chilprufe undergarments of their childhoods. Adult versions also existed. Vintage Chilprufe vests and bloomers sell for around £40 a set on Etsy. So there is clearly a nostalgia market – despite the discomfort involved in wearing pure new wool next to the skin. But technology has made huge advances in man-made thermal underwear since Damart was founded by brothers Joseph, Paul and Jules Despature in 1953. The French brothers, who had an existing fabric business, had the brainwave of using man-made fibres - first chlorofibre, and then thermolactyl – to make self-heating underwear. For many…

I am a disciple of John Seymour (1914-2004), the original ‘bread-winner’. His writing style captured the hearts of sedentary city-dwellers in the 1970s, pining for a wholesome self-sufficient lifestyle of the sort that has resurfaced today among off-grid smallholders. Living, as we do, 15 minutes from a Waitrose, should guarantee a degree of nutritional contentedness. Not so. We maintain that it is impossible to buy a decent loaf there. Yes, there is pane Pugliese from Italy, sourdough from San Francisco and German pumpernickel, but perhaps it is asking too much of a supermarket to supply an English artisan loaf. On market days, a baker from Poland sets up his stall and profits from those leaving Waitrose without the staff of life. His loaves sell at eye-watering prices – and he…

The Rev Canon Dr Alison Joyce, Rector of St Bride's, the Journalists’ Church, celebrated the life of Rosemary Righter, chief leader-writer at the Times. The Rector said, ‘Her outstanding contribution to journalism was the more remarkable, given the significant obstacles she faced when starting out as a woman in an overwhelmingly male industry, and there are many who owe her a profound debt of gratitude for her trailblazing work.’ Sir William Shawcross, Commissioner for Public Appointments, gave the first address: ‘We met in the early 1970s, when we arrived at the Sunday Times. ‘I thought she was wonderfully glamorous, with her long blonde hair, billowing shirts and quite tight trousers housing limbs she was proud to say were voted “the best legs in Cambridge”. ‘I quickly learned that that glamour…

In around December 1564, Suleiman the Magnificent, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire for more than 40 years, issued a decree. ‘I intend to conquer the island of Malta and I have appointed Mustafa Pasha as commander of the campaign. The island of Malta is a headquarters for infidels.’ What the Sultan wanted, the Sultan got. By March the following year, a great fleet of 130 galleys and many more auxiliaries was ready to set sail from Istanbul. Stopping to pick up even more troops from the Peloponnese, the Sultan's armada made steady progress. On 18th May, it was spotted off Malta. The Great Siege of 1565 had begun. As a new book on the siege by Marcus Bull argues, there is something peculiarly fascinating about these encounters. A siege stands…

If you drink, don't drive. Don't even putt. Dean Martin The English approach to ideas is not to kill them, but to let them die of neglect. Jeremy Paxman Dear the schoolboy spot We ne'er forget, though we are forgot. Byron, Sweetness In three words, I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on. Robert Frost Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority. Francis Bacon (1561-1626) Bad humour is an evasion of reality; good humour is an acceptance of it. Malcolm Muggeridge The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can't find them, make them. George Bernard Shaw Of all fatiguing, futile, empty trades, the worst, I suppose, is…

Ira Gershwin: A Life in Words By Michael Owen W W Norton & Co £30 The maid was so shocked to see her employer singing at his desk that she sought out the lady of the house: ‘Don't Mr Gershwin never go to work?’ Yes, he did – so much so that ‘Don't Mr Gershwin never stop working?’ would have been a better question. As the subtitle of Michael Owen's celebratory biography makes plain, Ira Gershwin (1896-1983) lived his life in words – words that, as for any real writer, didn't come easily. In the time it took Ira to come up with a lyric, his brother George (1898-1937) could knock off half a dozen tunes. So impatient was the melodist that he often called on other lyricists to fill…

London Coliseum, until 21st February ‘Is it still the same plot?’ asked the man sitting beside me, anxiously, at the first night of this new revival of Gilbert and Sullivan's witty, warm-hearted comic opera. Maybe he was just joking, but I shared his trepidation. Nowadays you never know what a radical director might do to ‘improve’ a Victorian masterpiece, even an evergreen classic such as The Pirates of Penzance. Our fears were utterly unfounded. English National Opera's rendition of this timeless entertainment takes no tiresome liberties with race or gender. It doesn't interfere with Sir Arthur Sullivan's divine score. It doesn't tamper with W S Gilbert's sacred text. Even the costumes are reassuringly traditional. The only concession to modernity is Alison Chitty's bold, abstract set. This production was first staged…

It's time for spice. I spent November and December researching the capital's finest Asian restaurants. For two of my visits, I made the mistake of taking along my friends Cecily, aged 11, and Ophelia, aged 8, who are a delight in a pizzeria but they can't bear spice. They find it in all sorts of everyday plain foods. So, for example, they won't touch Cumberland sausages; they can eat only those pink Richmond ones. Bread must be white and sliced because ‘brown tastes of mud’. There is only one type of meat – chicken – but, perversely, they opt only for leg. The rest of their meagre diet, whose lack of variety would shame a fussy caveman, consists of pasta and pesto, pizza (without cheese) and Weetabix under an avalanche…

A nonagenarian farming friend – a widow – went to start her Skoda Yeti. Nothing happened. She likes her Yeti, a rugged, simple and hitherto reliable vehicle. After checking the usual suspects – battery, fuel etc – she summoned help. The culprits were mice. It's not unheard-of for mice to interfere with engines – nice, warm, dark places in which to nest – especially in cars left unattended in garages or barns for long periods. But this Yeti lives outside and is used daily. It transpired that the invaders were feeding off the wires behind the dash, a nourishing nibble because environmentally-sensitive Skoda had replaced plastic coating of these wires with soya. This is an example of how the law of unintended consequences commonly applies to things done for virtuous…

The Oldie has always resisted a trip to Paris because we've all ‘been there, done that’. But then Kirker told us they have this chap, Patrick Bade, who can take us to parts the other tours won't reach: those secret corners and less-known museums and galleries that will delight even those who feel they already know the city well. After a stint at Christie's Education, Patrick lectured on art and opera at the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, the V&A and the National Gallery. He now lives in Paris for part of the year. Patrick writes, ‘Over the course of a lifetime I have spent a great deal of time in my favourite city, building up a wealth of knowledge about places that most visitors never spare the time to…

Pet gerbil given oxygen after house fire East Anglian Daily Times Two new food-hygiene scores are given for baguette shop and pizza place Bucks Free Press Man in trench coat Eastern Daily Press £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 Winterbottom Book Cloth? The first book to be bound in book cloth was issued in 1823 by the bookbinder Archibald Leighton. But it was not until another Archibald, the Manchester cloth and cotton merchant Archibald Winterbottom, started his own company in 1853 that the book-cloth industry really took off. Charles Dickens, William Thackeray and Wilkie Collins were all bestselling Victorian writers, but would their works have reached such a wide public without the invention of book cloth? The answer is no. Before book cloth, made of stiffly starched cotton, books had been bound in leather or vellum, which made them unaffordable except to the rich. Very often, books were first issued in limp, easily perishable paper coverings by the publisher, and it was up to the bookseller or…

‘About five years ago, there was a thrush who built her nest in a poplar tree, and she sang so beautifully that all the worms came up from their holes, the ants laid down their burdens, the crickets stopped their mirth, and the moths settled in the front row near her. ‘She sang a song as if in heaven, going up higher and higher as she sang. ‘At last, the song was done and the bird came down panting. ‘“Thank you,” said all the creatures. “Now my story is done.”’ That was written by P G Wodehouse, my step-great-grandfather, when he was seven. When I was a small boy, this little story hung in a frame in my bedroom. So did the somewhat terrifying school timetable (pictured on page 7),…

This is a bit mortifying. But I do deserve it. Around 20 years ago, I started getting offered honorary degrees. And I started accepting them. They were local ones at first. Not ivy-clad cloisters but – what shall I call them? – ‘Recently established seats of learning’: once polys or colleges of car maintenance. All fully understandable. After all, I had opened a few fêtes in the district. I was a local somebody. And these events were as harmless as fête openings. I would roll in, don the Harry Potter robe and, looking like Margaret Rutherford in a big hat, dish out the cardboard rolls to graduates. I delivered the necessary platitudes – mainly by flattering the parents. I told them that they had saved all that money to get…

When I tried to buy her tights from a woman as she emerged from the Ladies at an A303 service station, she became mildly alarmed. She started to back away, and her large husband got out of their car and advanced on us. ‘This guy giving you a hard time, luv?’ he asked. Fortunately, by then I'd explained my reasons, and she reassured him. It was 1970, and the regiment to which I was attached as a young medical officer was being posted to Cyprus for a six-month UN tour, and we were having a farewell ball in the officers’ mess. It was a Saturday, and I was dashing from Tidworth to Heathrow to collect my then girlfriend from a Dublin flight, when steam and smoke began to pour from…

I was born in 1971 at North Middlesex Hospital, Edmonton – same place as my dad. But the year I was there, a cockroach plague forced all mothers and babies to evacuate to a maternity home in Bishops Avenue, the former home of Gracie Fields. And here I spent the first week of my life, in a cot in the ballroom! That very same year, 1971, my dad, Chas Hodges, formed a duo with Dave Peacock – and thus Chas and Dave were also born. My dad played guitar. Dave was on bass. They set off to a pub, The Charcoal Burner in Ilford. They played anywhere and everywhere – everything from rock ‘n’ roll to singalong. This combined the music they both learnt from the family parties around a…

I'm slightly ashamed to say I begin to understand the advantages of a police state. It helps if you are a relatively benign dictator of a country with minimal corruption, a small population and lots of money, such as Turkmenistan. When it was part of the Soviet Union, almost all Turkmenistan's revenue from natural gas and oil went to Mother Russia, and the country remained backward and poor. Today, she keeps her money and spends it well. There are no beggars, hooligans, litter, unemployment or crime to speak of. Education and medical care are good, and the streets are safe. People are well dressed. Turkmenistan is secular, worship being a matter for the individual. Housing is mostly funded by government departments which compete with one another to attract the best…

You can't stop the march of progress, even if (I was tempted to write especially if) it will lead to disaster. The problem with progress is that it is always Janus-faced. Two steps forward, one step back – or is it the other way round? I read with astonishment, admiration and fear a recent paper in the New England Journal of Medicine. A youngish man with severe motor neurone disease, who had lost his muscular power of speech, had electrodes planted in his brain to help him to express himself in words – though the paralysis prevented him from doing so in the normal way. Associated with the paper was a recording of the man's unintelligible attempts at speech. The electrodes in the speech area of his brain transmitted impulses…

My wife has been studying for her driving theory test. My god, it's a lot more complicated than when I took it. There are questions on things like cardiopulmonary resuscitation. And yet, as the test becomes harder, the standard of driving on the roads is getting worse. Indicating seems to have become optional. People just drive and expect you to predict what they're going to do. It's even worse on motorways and A roads, where hardly anyone signals before changing lanes. Many people don't change lanes at all; they just sit in the overtaking lane, totally oblivious to the queue of drivers lining up behind them. It makes me rather miss the reckless bad driving of old. You know where you are with a boy racer, and you give him…

Clothes with words on them Earlier this year, I was at a festival of crime-writing where at least ten of the participants were wearing rock-tour T-shirts from the 1970s: Led Zeppelin; King Crimson; Deep Purple. These weren't replicas but vintage unwashed. I couldn't quite believe the pride with which they were being worn. ‘What are you doing?’ I wanted to ask. ‘First impressions are made inside seven seconds – and you want to lead with this? Has nothing happened to you since you heard Hawkwind headbang their way through Silver Machine at Manchester's Free Trade Hall in 1973? ‘Don't tell me you're in a rock band as well? Oh, you're the drummer. Don't you have children, or grandchildren, to put you right?’ Shortly afterwards, at a party, I met a…

In the nursery, he was known as Oliver Crumble – a foolish figure who would show signs of weakness at any given moment. Yet when I came to choose the title of my biography, after working on the subject for five years, I selected Cromwell, Our Chief of Men (1973). This was the opening of Milton's stately poem and there was no doubt that Cromwell had moved from a nursery joke to the lord of all as a direct result of my researches. The title of the book caused less confusion than my later work, The Weaker Vessel: Woman's Lot in 17th-Century England (1984). The brilliant – and brilliantly polite – writer Claire Tomalin exclaimed, on hearing it, ‘A Week with Ethel! That is an interesting title.’ When I published…

I wonder where the radio habit will go, when there's nobody left who remembers the wireless turning crackly as the dial hit Hilversum. Assuming that all audio is available any time for ever, ‘Listen to this and all other episodes on BBC Sounds, or wherever you get your podcasts’ used to seem a young, ‘entitled’ thing. My family did inherit the soon-to-bearchaic habit, waking and retiring with their radios on. Still, the youngest at 42 is also a podhead, and the eldest lives abroad and picks up everything on her phone. I may be (with Oldie-readers) among the last radio addicts. But that addiction is now on a falling trajectory. News first. I do get my news from the trusted BBC rather than social media (of course), but I often…

The funniest film ever made about rock music is – for better or worse – about to get its second act. Sequels are a high-risk business – so perhaps we should adopt the brace position for Spinal Tap II, scheduled for release this summer. The original in 1984, let's not forget, was a game-changer. Directed by Rob Reiner (who later made Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry Met Sally), This Is Spinal Tap was largely improvised, shot in just five weeks and pioneered the hand-held-camera, spoof-documentary format, since echoed by The Office and countless other comedies. It follows the sinking fortunes of a touring English heavy-metal band on a doomed and hilarious attempt to delight their American audience. And its portrait of this hopelessly deluded, absurdly stretchtrousered, knackered old combo…

In these dark days of winter, most of the vegetable garden is dormant. Yet there is one clump of bright green that continues to thrive, whatever the weather. This is the sorrel which I planted three years ago. When it occasionally loses its colour and dies down, it regrows within a few weeks. I used to grow another, larger and taller sorrel which developed flowers and seed at the end of summer; its leaves faded and didn't come back until spring. But it lasted nearly three years before becoming exhausted. This is common or broad-leaved sorrel, whereas the smaller plant which has replaced it is known as French sorrel. Employing the terminology of medieval battles, common sorrel has arrow-shaped leaves while the French variety has leaves more like a shield.…

As a publican, you can run out of a particular beer and your regulars might moan a bit – as regulars are wont to do. But, in all likelihood, they will simply order another of the beers on offer and chunter into that instead. Except one. Run out of Guinness, and – as the past few weeks have proved – you could have a full-scale mutiny on your hands. The 20-per-cent spike in sales over the last year seems to have caught the brewery by surprise, and many pubs’ normally lucrative pre-Christmas trade has been stymied by a distinct lack of the black stuff. An unexpected surge in the number of social-media ‘influencers’ who have discovered a fondness for the 260-year-old beer is, apparently, partly to blame. To quote a…

I have never much liked ads interrupting television programmes, especially when they come in an episode of Poirot just before he reveals the murderer. They ruin the mood and disrupt the flow, and we lose any dramatic tension created by the performers. I understand that it's how commercial TV channels keep the lights on and, in the pre-internet days, one simply had to put up with it. These days, it doesn't have to be that way. If, like me, you watch your television by way of a broadband connection – using, perhaps, the BBC iPlayer, ITVX, YouTube, Amazon, Netflix or one of the countless other channels – then you will have realised that, if you pay up, you can avoid the ads. What a blessed relief. When streaming first became…

‘The crow will tumble up and down At first sight of spring. And, in old trees about the town, Brush winter from its wing.’ John Clare (1793-1864), from Crows in Spring The first bird Carry Akroyd illustrated in this column was the hooded crow (Corvus cornix). The hoodie's European range dwarfs that of the carrion crow (Corvus corone), although their habits and habitat are identical. They even hybridise, as in the Highlands of Scotland. Maps show that carrion-crow habitation replicates almost exactly the hoodie's absence: eastern and southern Scotland, England and Wales (not Ireland). Yet the carrion has over 1m UK territories, the hoodie 285,000. Familiarity has bred poems: ‘Why solitary crow? He in his feathers Is a whole world of crow – of a dry-stick nest, Of windy distances…

Would you like to cover Syria now? I was asked to go to Syria today by Charles Glass [the journalist kidnapped in Lebanon in 1987]. I said, ‘No, I've just had my toe off.’ Are you optimistic about Syria? I think things will go quiet for a bit and then flare up again. Anything you can't leave home without? PG tips. Is there something you really miss? My own bed. Do you travel light? All my life I've had the burden of carrying 25 pounds of camera equipment. Did you draw as a child? I lived in a tenement slum house in Finsbury Park, and my father used to allow me to paint pictures on a piece of paper stuck to the wall. Where were you when you first picked…

‘There's a chance of a shower, darling.’ ‘OK, I'll bring my umbrella.’ The international South player le!t his metaphorical umbrella behind on this Six Clubs from the 2024 Spingold Trophy in Toronto. Plan the play on an opening spade lead to dummy's bare ace. Dealer South Neither Vulnerable (1) 20-22 ‘balanced’ but a practical approach. (2) Within a transfer structure, 3 ♦ shows hearts and 3 ♥ shows spades. This frees up 3 ♠ to show the minors, usually slammy. (3) Roman Key Card Blackwood agreeing clubs. (4) Zero or three of ‘five aces’ (including ♣ K). (5) Asking for ♣ Q – answer no. At trick two, declarer led a low club, East (correctly) playing low. In a moment he will wish to forget, declarer went up with the…

IN COMPETITION No 314 you were invited to write a poem called Sorted. Peter Hollindale's narrator was asked at the pearly gates, ‘At Tesco did you shop sustainably,/Or grease the palm of a palm oil millionaire?’ Basil Ransome-Davies looked at The Last Judgment on the Sistine wall, a kind of eschatological sorting hat. Christine Acres described sorting photographs, with ‘sports teams, all labelled underneath’ and Victorian ‘great, great whoevers without any names’. Hedley Russell gave a series of crossword clues, all giving the answer SORTED. Dorothy Pope praised the pillar box, collecting post to be sorted. Richard Langridge solved in a fanciful way the real problem of dog poo. Commiserations to them and to Heather Uebel, Frances Aitken, Max Ross, Albert Caton, Ian Higgins, P Hayes, Jenny Jones, Sheila Gray…

Forgive prodigal daughter Q Having cut off completely from our daughter because of her rudeness, we tried to make up and spent a surprisingly happy day with her and her husband. However, just before we parted, she exploded again, saying very hurtful things. We've decided this time to cut off completely. But recently she texted us, just saying, ‘Hello’. I think we should stick to our guns, but my wife wants to give her one more chance. What do you think? Name and address supplied A While it's true you have done what you can, I think cutting oneself off completely from a close family member is always a bad idea. If you possibly can, always keep just a tiny connection alive. Your daughter's ‘Hello’ was a reaching out to…