Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2025 i The Oldie

Griff Rhys Jones (p19) starred in Alas Smith and Jones with Mel Smith. He was in Not the Nine O’Clock News. Talkback, his company, produced Da Ali G Show and I’m Alan Partridge. Dr Jonathan Katz (p20) is Oxford’s Public Orator, responsible for the university’s Latin orations. He’s a Fellow at Brasenose and an All Souls Quondam Fellow. He was Head of Classics at Westminster School. Hope Coke (p22) was Social Media Editor and a news and features writer at Tatler. She has written for Air Mail and the Telegraph. In this issue, she writes about Anthony Powell, her great-grandfather. Christopher Simon Sykes (p31) is a writer and photographer. He wrote Hockney: the Biography and The Big House. With Hugh Massingberd, he published Great Houses of England.…

‘But the world is a dark enough place for even a little flicker to be welcome.’ That’s a great line from a great play – Terence Rattigan’s The Deep Blue Sea – currently playing at one of London’s great theatres (possibly the greatest), the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. The theatre is in my good books at the moment. It’s the first to sign up to a campaign I have launched. This might seem trivial to you – but, if successful, it will make a lasting difference to theatre-lovers and future theatre historians. As a rule, since they were introduced 200 or so years ago, playbills and theatre posters advertising a show have featured the month and the day of the show’s opening, but not the year. This means you can’t date…

WHAT IS Skibidi Toilet? Skibidi Toilet is a crudely animated online video series where disembodied human heads burst from toilets saying the word ‘skibidi’. The skibidi toilets wage war against figures with CCTV cameras for faces. It is the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen. The humour is rudimentary. The animation is basic. It might as well be made by AI. And so it is immensely popular with young children who delight in its low-grade inanity. Its creator, a Georgian man named Alexey Gerasimov, made around $23 million from his YouTube channel DaFuq!?Boom! last year. The popularity of Skibidi Toilet among the under-tens has led to its being termed one of the first pieces of true Generation Alpha culture. Generation Alpha is the cohort born after 2010, who follow on from Gen-Z.…

It’s sad, really, how misguided humans can be. If women want to be more attractive to men, rather than to other women, then it’s a mistake to suddenly have giant, fat lips out of proportion to your face. The eye registers that it’s a face that nature intended to have thin lips, and so the effect is jarring. The great mistake is to spend too much time staring in the mirror. You start to see faults where often there are none. Big lips don’t suit everyone. And yet many women stare at themselves for too long in the mirror and the next thing they have had fillers or lip-plumping balm. And the next thing they look ridiculous. Even the adverts for lip-plumping products show the models looking normal before -…

Our Young Mouse is only 25, but is far better with money than his slightly feckless dad. He announced a few months ago that he’d saved up enough money to leave the family nest and buy his own flat in west London. ‘It’s shared ownership,’ he said. ‘You buy a quarter of it and rent the rest.’ I sounded a note of fatherly caution. ‘Isn’t that where you get those horrible service charges?’ I asked. I’d read an article about the huge costs of shared-ownership schemes. ‘And who is running this scheme?’ I asked. ‘Something called Peabody,’ he replied. At the mention of Peabody, concerns evaporated. George Peabody (1795-1869) was the philanthropic American banker who founded the Peabody Trust, a prime example of Victorian social housing that really worked. We…

Death can hardly fail to be uppermost in people’s minds – with Good Friday and its liturgical account of Jesus’s terrible death on the cross only a few weeks ago; and the thousands being killed every day in the dreadful wars by which we are surrounded; and the death of Pope Francis on Easter Monday. Seeing the Pope only hours before he died being greeted by cheering tens of thousands in St Peter’s Square brought out some very mixed reactions and emotions. He was there against the advice of his doctors – admirable and very brave of him, and wonderful that he showed such strong independence of spirit right up to the very end. What sprang to my mind were the words near the conclusion of John’s Gospel: ‘I tell…

The Buried City: Unearthing the Real Pompeii By Gabriel Zuchtriegel Hodder Press £22 Pompeii is perhaps the most famous archaeological site in the world. And Gabriel Zuchtriegel, author of this superb book, is the German Director General of the site. It’s a time capsule of a thriving provincial city. Captivating works of art jostle with everyday life’s remnants, from cooking utensils to bakeries and beds in brothels - all frozen or, more accurately, fried in time, from that late morning on an autumn day in 79 AD when Hell was unleashed on the unsuspecting citizens. Vesuvius literally exploded from the pressure that would no longer be contained under the earth’s crust. The resultant pyroclastic waves, between 200°C and 300°C, which swept across the immediate landscape, brought sudden death to all…

Parallel Lines By Edward St Aubyn Jonathan Cape £20 To pick up an unread novel is to knock on a door you’ve never been through. Who will open it? Will they welcome you in? Once you’ve crossed the threshold, might you want to turn round and head straight back out again? On page one of Parallel Lines, Edward St Aubyn introduces Sebastian, who lives in a psychiatric unit. His mind is at the races, tripping over itself to free-associate, as he pays a rare and head-exploding visit to the countryside. His kind of company can be quite hard work and Sebastian, who suffers from what he identifies as ‘delusional omnipotence’, is archetypal. For contrast, there is Olivia, who lives in said countryside. Her mind is blessedly tidy and calm, despite…

THE LIONS KING When it was announced that the captain of the British and Irish Lions squad heading down to Australia this summer was to be Maro Itoje, no one was remotely surprised. As sporting shocks go, this one was up there with Paris St Germain winning the French football league or the Boat Race being scooped by Oxford or Cambridge. Everyone knew it was coming, because the England skipper is far and away the outstanding candidate for the job. He isn’t just a strong, courageous, tactically astute player. He isn’t just a leader on the pitch. He is also the kind of ambassador the Lions need to undertake their wider responsibilities. On the meet-and-greet circuit that is such a part of the tour itinerary, those in charge could ask…

Help! We’re running out of things. No more oil, copper or rare earths. In fact, the elements in this obscure slice of the periodic table are not particularly rare at all - and Ukraine doesn’t have much of them. What it does have is titanium, which combines steel’s strength with the corrosion resistance and lightness of aluminium, and makes brilliant white paint pigment. It’s expensive not because it is rare, but because it is hard to refine. As Ed Conway reveals in his book Material World, it is a struggle to find anything that we have truly exhausted. Rare-earth metals go into mobile phones and EV batteries. But such is the pace of development that today’s must-have battery ingredient might be displaced tomorrow by something as commonplace as an iron…

Of the phrases routinely uttered by gentiles that cause a Jewish head to oscillate in bewilderment, the most incomprehensibly goyish is ‘Ah well, at least it can’t get any worse.’ How can people talk like that? Have they failed to comprehend that Fate isn’t one to ignore a hubristic challenge? Hang your metaphorical gonads out to her, as the Greek tragedians appreciated, and it’s a dead cert that, within a day or two, Fate’s boot will administer a ferocious rebuke to those rashly exposed little orbs. Whatever specific ‘it’ it might be, in other words, it can always get worse, and it invariably does. What brought this witlessly obvious reflection to mind was a finding shared by my first cousin Dominic. Dom has a passion for genealogy, and it was…

People find it extraordinary that, before the election day, 80 years ago, on 5th July 1945, we had never sat down as a family and discussed what we would do if my father should become Prime Minister. It was such a strange election with the three-week wait between polling day and the count, to allow the huge postal vote from the servicemen and women overseas to reach their constituencies. Tuesday 26th July was a day that began with breakfast round the kitchen table at home, my mother then driving us to Stepney for the count. The day ended with a wildly enthusiastic Labour Partrally in Westminster Hall, where my parents arrived a little late, having come straight from the Palace. It was the early edition of the Evening Standard, glimpsed…

Nunc mihi vir adstat qui ipse professus est se in theatro cinematographico didicisse quomodo ea intellegere tandemque depingere posset quae diligenda quidem sed subtilia ubique circumstent… Picturam et poesim nonnulli maiorum nostrorum comparabant; honorandus noster ex mobilium illarum imaginum arte genus suum proprium poesis peperit; et hac lingua, ut ita dicam, tam ad gaudium quam ad dolorem praebendum usus, etiam extrema rerum humanarum praesentat inter loca et condiciones mire varias, clarissime descriptas. Nobis enim ex huius fabulis imagines offeruntur modo tranquillitatis, modo Urbium Feritatis et violentiae minarumque. Saepe tamen et mutantur res – illum taurum furentem revoco et autoraedarium conducticium, praedoneM OBSTinatum Henricum Hill, qui tiro se feliciorem habebat Praeside Civitatum Unitarum, et sacerdotem iuvenem Sebastianum in ‘Silentio’ versantem…. Praesento summum inter artifices magistrum, qui arte sua spectatores docet commotosque…

They used to be a familiar sight in the High Street: charity collectors rattling tins and those lovely old Labrador collection boxes for Guide Dogs for the Blind. As you passed, you dug out some loose change for them. That way, they were likely to collect quite a lot of money. But no longer. Not only do you rarely see such collectors these days, but most charities won’t even take cash any more. Out shopping recently, I was waylaid by a paramedic standing by a stall for the Thames Valley Air Ambulance charity. I was happy to support it. But while I was looking in my wallet for cash, I was told, ‘Sorry, we don’t accept cash.’ What? Next, I got out my card to make a one-off donation and…

Harriet Dart, Britain’s number-four tennis player, recently asked an official to tell her French opponent, Lois Boisson, to put on some deodorant. ‘She smells really bad,’ Dart said. Her words caused something of a stink. The incident made me think: when did BO disappear in civilian life? You barely smell it anywhere these days. At my school, one girl’s BO was so notorious I can still remember her name 45 years on, though I have never seen or heard of her since. I blanche with shame at how bitchy we were about the overwhelming stink. No one wanted to be in her class or dorm. She had no friends. BO was brutal back then, for the sufferer and for those around. A friend told me BO was a huge thing…

Yet another thoughtful piece in the Sunday papers about the Sycamore Gap atrocity. The incident impacted me less than others because my whole lifetime has been more or less in lockstep with the story of global environmental degradation. I remember being glued, in the 1980s, to a Sunday newspaper account of Amazon rainforest destruction in Rondônia - and the anomaly that, in the background, my parents were arguing about whose fault it was we had run out of horseradish sauce. And who was going to get in the car for a four-mile round trip to buy said condiment for the Sunday joint? ‘Ecological wounds’, to borrow Aldo Leopold’s memorable phrase, have been stalking me ever since boyhood, when a godparent gave me Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. I don’t know if…

St George’s Day usually passes (on 23rd April, in case you missed it) without much fanfare – apart from the laments of newspaper columnists that it is passing without much fanfare. Every year, the English are compared unfavourably, usually by themselves, with celebrants of the other home nations and their ostensibly more appropriate saints. This is hardly fair. The apostle Andrew had as much to do with Scotland as the martyr St George had to do with England, while Patrick was (whisper it) probably Welsh. His first encounter with the Irish was when he was enslaved by pirates from Ireland, according to his memoir (the Confessio). St David, Dewi Sant, is the only one of the home nations’ patron saints who could have been picked for his country’s football team…

A memorial service for the singer Marianne Faithfull was held at St Mary’s Church in Aldworth, the Berkshire village where Marianne’s late mother, Baroness Erisso, lived. Marianne was buried immediately afterwards, next to her mother, in the churchyard. Ringo Starr, Bob Geldof and Kate Moss attended. Keith Richards and Marianne Faithfull’s ex-boyfriend Mick Jagger sent flowers. The service was conducted by the Rev Grant Fensome, the Church of England vicar, assisted by Father Tom Montgomery, a Catholic priest who often visited Marianne in her last years. She was brought up as a Catholic. A musical tribute was played by rock singer Nick Cave, Warren Ellis, Ed Harcourt and Rob McVey. The organist was Richard Ingrams, former editor of Private Eye and founding father of The Oldie, who has lived in…

In 1946, aged 12, I began to board at a convent school in Rutland. My classmates were future debutantes. Academic achievements were neither expected nor desired. The curriculum focused entirely on literature and history of the ‘right sort’. Namely, celebrating Bloody Mary as a heroine of her age and Good Queen Bess as an illegitimate usurper in league with the devil. The aspiration was that we would all marry Catholic peers. As with all the girls, my faith was quasi-fanatical. What we lacked in balanced education we made up for in religious fervour. During my first summer at the convent, the nuns took us to the Norfolk coast as a treat. I bolted straight from the bus to the sea. After a few minutes of blissfully treading water, I stretched…

London Clubland: A Companion for the Curious By Seth Alexander Thévoz Robinson £25 I have never belonged to a London club. But … I trained for swimming the Hellespont at the Lansdowne Club. I was accused of being an emotional vampire at the Chelsea Arts Club. And I was advised by my father in the smoking room at Annabel’s, shortly before my first marriage, to ‘just stop’. I celebrated my 21st birthday at Brooks’s. I wrote a screenplay (which was never filmed) in the Hurlingham Club. Once a month at the Academy Club, I judged a poetry competition, into which I invariably submitted a hopeful entry under the pseudonym Janice Novaya. I say this not to boast. Or, at least, that’s not my only motivation. It’s also because I think…

Some people regard discipline as a chore. For me, it is a kind of order that sets me free to fly. Julie Andrews The older one becomes, the quicker the present fades into sepia and the past looms up in glorious Technicolor. Beryl Bainbridge I’m one of those regular weird people. Janis Joplin The saddest thing I can imagine is to get used to luxury. Charlie Chaplin Books can be broadly broken into two classes: those written to please the reader and those written for the greater pleasure of the writer. J K Galbraith It is never too late to be what you might have been. George Eliot If pigeons were as rare as nightingales, we would adore them. Ronald Blythe I am free of all prejudice. I hate everyone…

ROMEO AND JULIET Shakespeare’s Globe, London, until 2nd August A Wild West Romeo and Juliet? It sounds like a terrible idea. I feared the worst for the Globe’s new rendition of Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy. I needn’t have worried about the setting. The Wild West stuff actually works quite well. As always, it’s the story that’s the biggest problem. Samuel Pepys said Romeo and Juliet was the worst play he’d ever seen. I wouldn’t go quite that far, but it’s surely Shakespeare’s worst denouement. In case you’ve forgotten, a foolish Friar comes up with a cunning plan worthy of Blackadder’s Baldrick. Give Juliet a sleeping potion that will make everyone think she’s dead, so she can wriggle out of her arranged marriage to a chinless chump called Paris. What could possibly…

DECLINE AND FALL OF RADIO 3 On the Sunday the clocks went forward, Radio 3 devoted the day to the centenary of composer, conductor and self-appointed godfather of the post-1950s musical avant garde Pierre Boulez (1925-2016). It turned out to be a thinly curated affair built round the network’s usual Sunday schedules. There were a couple of events live from the Barbican and a gem of an edition of Private Passions with scholar-composer Gerard McBurney, who’d worked with Boulez during his time with the Chicago Symphony. But that was about it. Eight days later, the BBC took a last decisive step in the dismantling of the old Third Programme/Radio 3 ethos – that marriage of intellectually impeccable speech programming with the high-end music and drama the network had been created…

YOUR TREAT! I’ve been on a roll of being treated to lunch and dinner. Don’t be envious. It’s so stressful. Just what are the rules of engagement? Going Dutch is simple and relaxing: you both sit there out-choosing each other. Happy thought bubbles hover around the table. ‘If he’s having the larks’ tongues at £25, I’ll have the dormice in honey for £28’ etc. And, as for the wine, you can both go through the list and then blurt out, ‘I really can’t afford a 2010’, in the hope they’ll say, ‘Let me pay the extra.’ But when you’re taken out, it’s one long trauma interspersed with lots of faux humble gratitude. What to choose? Like most of you, I was brought up with the rule ‘Order the cheapest dishes…

THE MAGIC OF ROUNDABOUTS Some claim that the first was spotted in the US in 1903; others that the earliest pure-bred example was identified in France in 1907. A solitary specimen migrated to Britain - Letchworth - in 1909. Since then, they have proliferated throughout the UK. According to ChatGPT, there are now 25,976 of them. France is reckoned to have the most, with confirmed sightings of approximately 67,000. I have long owned an illustrated book about them. I am talking about roundabouts. They used to be known as gyratories, happily renamed in this country in 1926. ‘Roundabout’ is a much more human, almost cuddly term, suggestive of co-operation and engagement - even fun - rather than the cold, technical ‘gyratory’. It’s like the difference between imperial measurements - an…

Tenerife is the ideal destination to escape an English winter: a perfect combination of sunshine, verdant mountainous landscapes and Spanish colonial architecture. And we’ll be going at the time of their carnival which only Rio supersedes. Yet the wonders don’t end there. Oldie stalwart Kirsty Fergusson knows the island and its gardens well, and has plotted our itinerary, which includes a day trip to the romantic island of La Gomera; and a tasting of Malmsey, a surfeit of which overwhelmed the Duke of Clarence. Kon-Tiki fans will be delighted to know we’ll be visiting the home of Thor Heyerdal. Kirsty has also chosen our hotel near Garachico, La Quinta Roja, the 17th-century home of the Marquesas de la Quinta Roja. Have a look at quintaroja.com ITINERARY– please go to www.theoldie.co.uk/courses-tours…

Kirsty Fergusson will take you into the homes and gardens of some very distinguished ex-pat residents, as well as taking in some of the remarkable highlights of Morocco’s cultural heritage. Beginning in Tangier, where Africa meets Europe, our garden visits take us to both Mediterranean and Atlantic coastal vantage points. The city had a somewhat raffish reputation during the 20th century as a popular haunt for spies, pop stars and writers of the Beat Generation. This has been largely eclipsed by its growing sophistication, led by an international cast of interior designers and artists of every stripe. Fez, the capital of Morocco before 1912 when the French Protectorate was established, has a tangible sense of nobility and tradition. Riad gardens designed on the traditional Islamic model are to be found…

Clues marked *have a place on 13/24 Across Across 1 *Cut great deal (8) 5 *Golf cart carrying American (6) 9 Consider a time in century old holiday cottage (8) 10 Understand and act to bring in power display on dashboard (6) 12 Understand printer corrected text regularly (9) 13 Shot seen in game of golf (5) 14 Sort of American who’s in now as president (4) 16 Reveal support for what Remainers do before leaving (7) 19 *Conned by sporting occasion (7) 21 *Tiresome people with no energy (4) 24 Board put forward subject for discussion (5) 25 Select actors when holding profit for instrument (9) 27 Not quite bringing up fruit (6) 28 *Fancy parcel wrapping five discovered (8) 29 Put into words seeing Romeo occupying stage (6)…

Canadian international John Carruthers, a friend from Toronto, showed me this four spades from the Soloway Knockout Teams. Plan the play on an opening heart lead. Dealer West Neither Vunerable Where Carruthers was West, declarer had won the heart lead and led a spade to the king. West had won the ace and put his partner in with a second heart, and the defence had soon won two diamond tricks in addition - when East naturally switched to the suit. One down. However, there is a winning line, not immediately obvious. You need to use a technique which Ely Culbertson (unimaginatively) referred to as ‘the coup without a name’ - now known as the Scissors Coup. After winning the first heart, at trick two you cash the ace of clubs,…

For the last year and a half, my dad has been shuffling from his nursing home onto the byways, tracks and commons of his neighbourhood. This has been a miraculous, late strolling period for a man who has always walked - roaming Somerset lanes as a 1950s hedge kid, clocking up 1,105½ miles of English towpath in retirement (he counted). Dad has an atypical form of dementia (aren’t they all?), and he’s been with it enough to be the only care-home resident allowed out unaccompanied for a wander. Gradually, however, his stuttering stride - known as gait-freezing - has worsened. Eventually, he wasn’t safe even with a wheeled walker known as a rollator. So, six months ago, I acquired a second-hand Shoprider, an electric mobility scooter in a tasteful shade…

Tycoon’s £230m yacht seen off Shetland Press and Journal Candidate promises to do nothing if elected Guernsey Press Aldi told it can’t build new Bournemouth supermarket Southern Daily Echo £15 for published contributions NEW! Tune Into Radio Oldie Every Tuesday, you can find the latest weekly interview by Harry Mount or Charlotte Metcalf with some of our Oldie friends, such as Stephen Fry, Craig Brown and AN Wilson. And we release three more podcasts on Top of the Pods, our selection of the best podcasts and comedy clips on the internet. Just sign up for the newsletter on the homepage of the website. Sign up to our weekly e-newsletter…

WHO WERE Charters and Caldicott? Charters and Caldicott, the inseparable, cricket-obsessed comic duo, began their on-screen lives as supporting characters in Hitchcock’s masterpiece The Lady Vanishes (1938). The pair, played by charming Basil Radford (1897-1952) and Naunton Wayne (1901-70), endeared themselves to audiences immediately. Calls for them to be written into new scripts for films and plays grew louder and louder. After 57 performances on the London stage in a play, Giving Away the Bride (1939), their next billing was in Carol Reed’s Night Train to Munich (1940), starring Rex Harrison. They next appeared in the comedy spy thriller Crook’s Tour (1940), and a jolly bit-part in Millions Like Us (1943). Their popularity with wartime audiences increased with every appearance. Wayne and Radford demanded larger roles and more money from…

This summer, on Channel 4, I will appear to lay claim to the Land of Cotton. Griff’s American South contains all the essential aerial, train and crowd shots you desire, and introduces y’all to six states, in six weeks. I plunge into the Deep South – from quilt-making to bluegrass (at the Gospel Chicken House in the Appalachian Mountains) and meet cheerleaders casually tossing one another 16 feet into the air. There’s no CGI. It’s all real. I do actually get into a drag-racing car with Frogg, we do actually hit 100mph after a sixth of a mile, and that is my real facial expression as I try to find a non-existent seat belt. Forty years after I was first recruited to point at things and say, ‘How beautiful,’ I…

In the early summer of 1975, I found myself on tour round the USA with the Rolling Stones, employed to take photographs for a tour diary. It was my first ever photographic assignment covering rock ’n’ roll - I’d previously specialised in photographing the interiors of stately homes. The job had come about after a chance meeting with the Stones’ financial manager, Prince Rupert Loewenstein, who told me the band were looking for someone to put together a diary of their upcoming tour of the USA. They had not yet employed anyone to do this, but he told me that if I wanted the job, I would have to fly to the USA, where they were already rehearsing at Andy Warhol’s house in Montauk. I would have to pay my…

I last went up the Empire State Building 40 years ago and I’d forgotten what a truly gobsmacking experience it is. Visitors have been gawping at the view for almost 100 years, and yet today it’s as fresh and exciting as ever. Some 2.6 million visitors visited last year, paying $129 million, as much as the commercial rents bring in. The building belongs to that wonderfully confident, spacious, ’30s New York style, with Art Deco everywhere. It takes up a whole block and has five public entrances manned by smartly dressed doormen (maroon uniforms, peaked hats, lots of gold braid), politely and tirelessly redirecting the public to the visitors’ entrance. Providing observation platforms is a competitive business and always has been. The aim in 1931 was for it to be…

A picture of the King is displayed in every British Embassy. But in Ireland’s London embassy, there proudly hangs a portrait of the world’s most famous Irishwoman, the novelist Edna O’Brien (1930-2024). Edna, the unacknowledged Queen of Ireland, is the subject of a new, acclaimed documentary film, The Blue Road, produced by James Bond mogul Barbara Broccoli. It includes last interviews with the great lady as she approached death, last July, aged 93. Barbara B has been in love with Edna since her schooldays - just like everyone else. When I once ventured a mildly critical view of Edna’s early novels (beguilingly written, I suggested, but essentially chick lit), I was told, fiercely, that I was just jealous. Of course I’m jealous! Here’s an honorary dame with talent, beauty, sex…

The coming of VE Day and VJ Day each year is always poignant. The numbers who took part in the fighting, and who still survive, have diminished to a heroic few. The numbers of books about the Second World War, however, continue to swell. Most of these books, in so far as I’ve sampled them, are stultifyingly boring and badly written. Indeed, I know only one true masterpiece, written in English, about the war – Alan Clark’s Barbarossa: The Russian-German Conflict, 1941-45 (1965). Whereas his earlier book The Donkeys destroyed the reputation of the British top brass in the First World War and, in its caustic analysis of the battles on the Western Front, inspired the musical Oh! What a Lovely War, Barbarossa is not about Britain at all. It…

It is easier to start a health scare than to end one. Likewise, it’s easier to raise public anxieties than to calm them. Perhaps the clearest example is the worldwide panic over the alleged link between the MMR vaccine and childhood autism. No matter how many times the original research is shown to have been faulty to the point of fraud, a residue of suspicion remains in the public mind – to damaging effect. Recently, I saw a headline, ‘Don’t have surgery on Friday’. This was to draw the public’s attention to a statistical study of 429,691 adult patients in Ontario. Between 2007 and 2019, they underwent surgery either on Friday or on Monday. Taking population statistics into account, this suggests that, in 13 years, citizens of Ontario, and no…

Ranch dressing down SIR: Prue Leith’s article on Australia’s outback and brothels (Prue’s News, Spring issue) left nothing to the imagination, but in relating her trip to the mining town of Kalgoorlie, the article suddenly moved Australia from one continent to another! Australia does not have ‘ranches’: that is the prerogative of the USA. Thanking you, Marjorie Brown, Glenunga, Australia In Cary Grant’s shoes SIR: David Greenway recounts (‘Generous Grant’, Spring issue) that Cary Grant was attired in immaculate black tie and carpet slippers. Cary’s footwear would have been expensive dress slippers as worn by many male stars at the time, including Clark Gable. Fashion labels are promoting them once again, although they’re now no longer tied to formal wear. I’ve dined with a duke who was proudly sporting his…

Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America By Sam Tanenhaus Random House £33 To adapt Winston Churchill, the American conservative journalist and commentator William F Buckley (1925-2008) was an immodest man who had much to be immodest about. ‘I am, I fully grant, a phenomenon,’ said Buckley, born 100 years ago, on 24th November 1925. ‘But not because of any haste in composition. I asked myself the other day, “Who else, on so many issues, has been right so much of the time?” I couldn’t think of anyone.’ It’s a bold claim, but consider the facts. In a 65-year-long career, Buckley turned out literally thousands of newspaper articles, founded the still thriving National Review magazine and hosted the American television hour Firing Line for 1,054 episodes over 33…

Sceptred Isle: A New History of the Fourteenth Century By Helen Carr Hutchinson Heinemann £25 In August 1151, Henry, Duke of Normandy, swept into Paris to pay homage to his overlord, King Louis VII of France. Henry, who was also a likely candidate for the English throne through his mother, Matilda FitzEmpress, secured far more than just a duchy during his few days in Paris. He convinced Louis’s queen, Eleanor of Aquitaine, to divorce her husband and marry him instead. This marriage, which followed in May 1152, brought Henry, and then the crown of England, the immense wealth and land of Aquitaine - nearly one-third the size of modern France. Henry and Eleanor’s descendants, particularly Edward III and Richard II, would be haunted by the diminishment of their inheritance of…

Stripping actors Actors are increasingly pressurised to squander their lives honing themselves into states of implausible bodily perfection. If the repercussions of #MeToo have spared women some of the indignities of display, male gym bunnies scampered in to fill the gap. The T-shirt strains and bulges in all the approved places. Trousers cling, to the point of inconvenience. A costume exists only to be torn off, revealing yet another Instagrammable, strangely sexless body, fit only for loveless Love Island. The trim figure is part of theatre’s armoury. As Elizabethan boy actors were ogled, and Restoration actresses were fetishised, so our current crop of favourites are stalked and salivated over. Sex should be only an appetiser at the theatrical feast; not the main course. Audience concentration is a fragile thing. In the…

News of the novelist Jane Gardam’s death, at 96, reminded me of my favourite Radio 4 play, based on Gardam’s short story The Tribute. An old nanny, Finch, known as Finchie, has died. She served five families in colonial days. None of the families ever paid her – ‘just her keep’ – but they entrusted her with their ghastly children, knowing she would bring them up to have nice manners and be kind. As these comfortably-off ex-expat women pass round news of her death – ‘Ate like a bird’; ‘She’d been in love once, but he was married’ – they hear there’s a niece who wants to meet them for lunch and give them some little mementos Finchie left. God! They grudgingly agree. As they sit waiting in Harrods, memories…

WHEN COOL WAS HOT Whatever happened to the idea of ‘cool’? Who was cool back in the day? Who’s cool today? And why does it now mean the opposite of what it used to? For us ’60s teenagers, the coolest rock stars were a cut above the rest. They radiated a sense of effortless talent, devil-may-care nonchalance and a cavalier disregard for the establishment. They gave the (artfully engineered) impression that they put no thought or consideration into anything they did or said and just made it all up as they went along. Jimi Hendrix was the epitome of cool – decadent, debauched, apparently living beyond the law in a series of impossibly chic military jackets. Bob Dylan, absurdly cool – detached, unknowable, brilliantly wrong-footing the irksome queries of media…

SALAD LEAVES Cut-and-come-again is not an attractive phrase but where you see the description on the back of a seed packet of salad leaves, they are well worth growing. Last year, having broadcast seeds of mixed lettuce leaves, we were cutting them, and they were coming again, throughout the summer and into autumn. Mizuna is an originally Japanese mustard green, with serrated leaves and a peppery flavour. An oriental seed mix is likely to contain a variety of mustards, as well as mizuna and the similar mibuna. They are happy in cool, damp weather and will tolerate the cold. However, as brassicas, they are tempting to pigeons and may need to be netted. Sarah Raven also supplies seeds of spicy mustard wasabi. Simpson’s Seeds of Horningsham, Wiltshire, have an Italian…

HIGH-ALTITUDE WINE English winemakers will be delighted with this year’s warm and sunny spring. So will the vignerons of Champagne and the Loire Valley. Fragile buds are bursting into life, unthreatened by frost, and fingers are crossed for a ripe and abundant vintage. Winemakers in warmer latitudes have no problem ripening their grapes: they just worry, in this era of global warming, that they might ripen too early, leaving their wines heady and unbalanced. One tactic is to compensate for latitude with altitude (or elevation, as they say in the wine world). A vineyard planted at 600m, for example, will be roughly 3.6°C cooler than one at sea level. Take Spain. The harvest of Palomino grapes in Jerez starts in late August, when the grapes are ripe but lacking in…

A reader writes that she is concerned that her husband, new to the internet, has been trustingly going wherever it leads him. He devours what he finds there and is developing political views that she finds unappealing. She’s worried he is being led astray. She is right to worry. He is at risk. One of the strengths of the internet is the access it gives us to a range of opinions. But one of its weaknesses is that it tends to send you further and further down a single path, right or wrong. Especially at risk are those, like our reader’s husband, with modest digital proficiency; he has limited experience in managing the nuances of safe internet navigation. The seductive allure of the single mouse click is hard to resist.…

When it comes to the long-eared owl (Asio otus), beauty is in the eye of the beholder. W H Hudson, in British Birds (1895), said, ‘The long-eared owl may be described as a bird of beautiful plumage.’ And John Lewis-Stempel wrote in The Secret Life of Owls (2017), ’Plumage is dreary grey, with the typical bars and streaks of a woodland habitué.’ Differing opinions aside, one is unlikely in Britain to see this most nocturnal and discreet of owls. Miriam Darlington, in Owl Sense (2018), rated the chance, in climbing terms, as ‘ED’ - extremely difficult. This is not principally because of scarcity. Distributed across the UK and Ireland, its 1,000-3,600 pairs earn it a green classification on the GB Birds of Conservation Concern list. In Ireland, long-eared and barn…

Here we go with the King and the Queen of houses, rolled into one glorious whole. Mount Stuart on the Isle of Bute in Scotland is difficult, if not impossible, to beat for electric beauty. The first sight of it makes you yell out loud with delight and then, the more you explore its quite extraordinary strength and individuality, go on shouting with pleasure. A mixture of Venetian, French and Spanish Gothic, it is so very extraordinary and unexpected that you can barely believe what stands before you. It was rebuilt by the 3rd Marquess of Bute after a fire in 1879. He employed Robert Rowand Anderson as his architect and was largely responsible for the house’s sumptuous interior himself, most meticulously supervising the brilliance of the artist and artisans…

IN COMPETITION No 319 you were invited to write a poem called The Monster Replies. Gail White concluded with a paradoxical offer from the monster: ‘Look underneath your bed tonight/And I’ll pretend I’m real.’ Brian Allgar’s monster hated familiarity: ‘But you must never rudely call me "Nessie”;/The fate of those who do is very messy!’ William Wood’s monster was Hope, tempting you to clutch at false straws. Commiserations to them and to Ronan Fitzgerald, David Dixon, Alan Pentecost, Frank McDonald, Stefan Badham, Ann Beckett, Albert Caton and Andrew Lacey, and congratulations to those printed below, each of whom wins £25, with the bonus prize of The Chambers Dictionary going to Charles Leedham-Green. There is a monster in my soul that wakes when I’m asleep.It churns the angry waters of the…

Since the recent power failure brought Heathrow to a halt, many oldie holidaymakers have quailed at the idea of an airport. Instead, they are delighting in all Britain has to offer. Start with some of the finest hotels in Europe, some offering Michelin-starred cuisine. And there are historic places to stay to suit all budgets, from castles to National Trust curiosities. Self-catering holidays range from country houses and seaside cottages to luxury yurts or converted railway wagons. There are cruises round the Scottish isles, and longboat and barge holidays along some of our loveliest rivers and canals. Or stay in comfortable pubs far from the madding crowds in breathtaking scenery in one of our magnificent National Parks. Sail on Lake Windermere, stay at a winery or join a walking or…

The pills do work Q I have been prescribed pills for depression for years now. They have improved my life immeasurably. My doctor suggested I try to come off them, and I’m finding it really difficult. I have tried to withdraw gradually and take one every other day, but I still feel terrible. I’m now 84 and I would rather live a short and happy life than a long and miserable one. I have been back to my doctor, but he is insistent that I persevere. What can I do? Nothing else works. Harriet B, Canterbury A This is a big problem with doctors. They put you on the pills that initially are marvellous – and then, when they want you to come off them, you can’t. I feel this…