Innholdsfortegnelse for July 2025 i The Oldie

Catriona Olding (p16), a writer and painter, contributed to Low Life: The Spectator Columns – The Final Years by her husband, Jeremy Clarke. He died in her arms in 2023 in her Provence home. Dick Clement (p18) and Ian La Frenais wrote The Likely Lads, Porridge, Lovejoy and Auf Wiedersehen, Pet. In 1965, he directed Peter Cook and Dudley Moore in Not Only … But Also. Paul Heiney (p21) presented That’s Life!, In at the Deep End, Countrywise and Watchdog. He wrote The Last Man Across the Atlantic about his transatlantic trip in his family boat. John Humphrys (p31) presented the Today programme from 1987 to 2019. He was the Mastermind host from 2003 to 2021. From 1981 to 1987, he was the main host on the Nine O’Clock News.…

Merlin Holland, the grandson of Oscar Wilde, first introduced me to Robert De Niro. Look, if you’re not into name-dropping, this really isn’t the column for you. Skip straight to Dr Dalrymple on page 43. He’s very much on form this month. It was at a screening of the film of Wilde’s Salome at the British Film Institute on London’s South Bank. Sorry, I’ve got that wrong. It was Al Pacino who directed and starred in Salome. That’s who Merlin introduced me to. So where did I meet De Niro? Now I think about it, it was probably at De Niro’s Manhattan restaurant, the Tribeca Grill, now closed, but a cool dining spot in its day. And, believe it or not, I think it was one of the grandchildren of…

WHAT IS looksmaxxing? Looksmaxxing is the practice of ‘maxing out’ your appearance through a series of strategic interventions. The idea, increasingly popular with a subset of online men, is to take what God has given you in the face department – and make it better. You might think of looksmaxxing as the male equivalent of teenage girls trying on each other’s mascara or giving each other ‘glow-ups’ in the school loos – only the looksmaxxers have decided to give it a serious-sounding name, apply a dubious patina of evolutionary science and treat the whole business like a kind of real-life video game. You can tell looksmaxxing is much more serious and masculine because – like the male chromosome – it has two xs. This is testosterone toner. At its most…

During my three decades of living with HIV/Aids, well-meaning people have always foisted advice on me: from macrobiotic diets to much more drastic treatments. I shunned all that and stuck to a rigid diet of tinned Fray Bentos steak-and-kidney pies with Cadbury’s Smash and frozen peas, washed down with God’s own tonic – soluble Solpadeine in ice-cold Perrier. It would be my death-row meal. Fray Bentos pies have never been bettered. They would survive a nuclear holocaust. They prop up anything substantial. And, in the right hands, they’re quite an effective weapon. Charlie Mortimer and Roger Mortimer wrote Dear Lupin…: Letters to a Wayward Son…

We’re not really all two-faced duplicitous liars. It’s just that we like to appear as kind and polite as possible. So we voice all the platitudes and evasions that come unbidden and so very naturally to our lips. We oldies are particularly given to all of this – manners, you know – but anyone British will know the situation exactly. The word ‘sorry’ is the most frequently uttered piece of nonsense to trip off the British tongue – something foreigners seem to find charming and bewildering in equal measure. Someone walks right into you: you’re sorry. Someone speaks over you: you’re sorry. In speech, we are innately self-effacing and given to understatement. But beneath the ready smile lurks a broiling undercurrent of our true, less generous thoughts. Here are our…

• Stunning • Playground of the rich and famous • Marmite (unless it’s the actual stuff you put on toast – never as in ‘Jeremy Corbyn is Marmite’) • Ancient – unless it’s pre the fall of Rome • City of contrasts • Go the extra mile • Azure • Stylish accommodation • A nightmare • Dream • Footprints • Hubby • Nothing beats seeing a lion/elephant/leopard in the wild • Must-see and must-do • Brits • Whilst and amidst • Winding, cobbled streets • Boasting, as in a hotel boasting 24 restaurants • Picturesque • Breathtaking • Brill • Chillax • Melting pot • Eye-watering • Pampering • Blighty • 18-30 crowd • Airport Hell • To-die-for • Vibrant • Vivid hotchpotch of colours, smells, sounds • Summer’s lease…

In October 2024, I returned from a bridge-playing holiday in Sri Lanka, with a hugely bloated stomach. I attributed it to diverticulitis, diagnosed 30 years earlier. I went to my GP, who recommended I attend Ashford A&E for a scan. It started an NHS experience: triage, CT scans, two nights waiting in corridors and a five-hour emergency operation. On recovery from the anaesthetic, I felt down my body to find a bag attached next to a huge five-inch scar starting from my belly button. The surgical team passed by the next morning and said they had removed a blockage from my sigmoid colon. They had also created a stoma, or opening -and around it a bag had been stuck on, to collect my poo. This stoma was reversible. So I…

Last year, at the Wilderness Festival on the Cornbury Park Estate in the Cotswolds, I was congratulating the caterers on the food, and their boss, Alex Head, said, ‘You should be one of our guest chefs.’ I said that would be fun – and then promptly forgot about it. If I’d thought about it at all, I’d have assumed it would be for 40 or 50 people for a couple of courses for lunch. So when I had a reminder that my recipes for this year were two weeks overdue, it was a shock. Especially as they were to be for not 50 people but 450. Twice. Lunch and dinner. And five courses. And no nuts. And gluten-free and vegan options, please. Oh dear. I did what I always do…

It is wonderful when the Roman Catholic Church gets it right. The conclave for the papal election made me proud to be a member of the Church of Rome. It was a very impressive occasion – and not because of its pomp and antiquity. Its keynotes were dignity, charity and lack of fuss. The cardinals, including the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Vincent Nichols, were clearly moved and awed by the occasion. To summarise Cardinal Nichols’s comments after the event: he specified that being sealed off from the world (literally – the doors of the Sistine Chapel were locked and stayed locked for the time it would take to elect a new pope) was immensely peaceful. He went on to say that there was no rancour or politicking among the cardinals.…

I met Sid Vicious in a New York nightclub in November 1978. He was out on $50,000 bail, accused of murdering his girlfriend Nancy Spungen. I was playing the guitar in a group and had gone with the keyboard player to an edgy music venue in the East Village, CBGB, hoping to perform on a free-for-all open-mic night. Ever since the age of 12, I’ve spent blissful hours playing guitar on my own or with friends. My ventures into the public arena have never been as easy. One mishap occurred just before the CBGB visit, at the Warwick University folk club. My fellow player asked me if I’d made up the song I had been playing – ‘The Curragh of Kildare’ – and I found myself inexplicably saying, ‘Yes.’ In…

The Spy in the Archive: How One Man Tried to Kill the KGB By Gordon Corera William Collins £25 After the fall of Communism, Western embassies inside the former Eastern Bloc came under siege from ‘walk-ins’. Almost everyone seemed to have secrets to sell about the dark heart of the Soviet experiment. And they were willing to hand them over in return for a one-way ticket to Idaho, a picket fence and pocket money to get them by for the first decade or so. Most were blaggers or liggers – freeloaders who knew no more about the KGB than you or I. But occasionally, the real deal walked in — and none was more real than Vasili Mitrokhin, the crotchety Russian bean-spiller who forms the focus of Gordon Corera’s fascinating…

Period dramas Period dramas are crammed with anachronistic clothes, cars, homes, vocabulary and hairstyles. Here are my ten golden rules for utter ineptitude in capturing the past on screen: 1 Always assume periodisation is rigid. The roads of 1965 should be packed with recent model cars, with no vintage Austin A40 Somersets or Standard Vanguards. 2 Similarly, 1970s homes were always furnished with the latest designs rather than with five-year-old sofas and outdated radiograms. The protagonist should also live in a house built no earlier than the decade of the narrative’s setting. 3 Slow the narrative to a sloth-like crawl to display how elaborate, and expensive, ‘period detail’ can substitute for character development. 4 Bonus points for a Land Rover appearing in the Second World War. 5 Employ the Period…

I’m glad Radio Oldie’s Top of the Pods recommended This Cultural Life with John Wilson. Wilson’s well-prepared interviews are superior to others in a crowded field. The chosen episode (my choice too) was the pianist James Rhodes, whose terrible story was re-told. He was raped from the age of five by a gym teacher, Peter Lee, now dead, at his London prep school. Now 50, Rhodes spoke with enthusiasm of his recovery via rediscovery of Bach’s Chaconne from Partita no 2. Might it have been on Radio 3? While I respect Richard Osborne’s cogent demolition in The Oldie of Radio 3’s ‘ignorance of its past’ and obsession with ‘soothing, mind-numbing music’, jewels are still found, even on 3’s ‘immersive mix-tapes’. Since most programmes now woo podcast audiences, only stolid adherents…

LIVE AID, FORTY YEARS ON I got the phone call and had to lie down. The Old Grey Whistle Test, the BBC’s late-night rock show, was to front an international live broadcast. The old lags in Neil Young T-shirts with a modest audience of three million were going to present a ‘global jukebox’ from Wembley Stadium to every corner of the earth with a TV set. We were called to the office to plan what they ironically called ‘this small TV extravaganza’. Bob Geldof had asked the BBC to screen Live Aid and they’d simply fielded their ‘rock-music experts’ but, as our producer nervously declared, ‘It’s like getting Radio Cambridge to cover the election.’ But that amateur spirit was part of the fabric of the whole event, which had all…

MINT Mint has a mind of its own. A plant of Moroccan mint given to me a few years ago would, I hoped, provide a few leaves for tea. But, last year, having spread and multiplied, it almost overwhelmed the ageing asparagus bed. The mint known as lemon balm has become so well established in the garden and is so prone to self-seeding that new plants appear every year in different places among the flower-beds. This mint is said to relieve stress and improve one’s mood, but it has the opposite effect on me. On the other hand, our favourite culinary spearmint, which is contained within an area of gravel, had a disappointing season last year and now grows better in a large pot. However, I am hoping that its…

BOOZE CRUISE IN A MINI Le Welsh is, geographically speaking, a strapping mongrel of a dish. A brasserie staple throughout the Nord-Pas-de-Calais, it consists of a thick slice of bread slathered with a mix of local bière brune and Galloway, an industrial Scottish Cheddar, seasoned with Worcestershire sauce and Dijon mustard, then baked until brown and bubbling. And its name honours Wales. Add some Parma ham, wash it down with a pint of Guinness and you’ll have the Six Nations on a plate. I was in the north of France in search of wine, not beer. Vineyards might be thin on the ground (although Belgium apparently has a burgeoning winemaking scene), but wine isn’t – at least, not in the vast wine stores in Calais’s suburbs. Both the Calais Wine…

The spoonbill (Platalea leucorodia) is from the Ciconiiformes family – as are the heron, bittern, stork, egret, ibis and flamingo. It is a fen-, estuary- and sea-marsh-dwelling summer migrant from West Africa. Until this century, it had not bred in England since 1668. Its enjoyment of the once marshy old world is demonstrated by a plethora of local names, among them shoveler. It was Rev John Ray (1627-1705), ‘father of natural history’, who named it spoonbill and transferred the name shoveler to the spoonbill duck. Ray pioneered the concept of species. Eighteenth-century sea banks and drainage, particularly in East Anglia, caused the spoonbill’s disappearance, except as a bird of passage. A lesser reason was its popularity as a table bird, especially the young branchers (birds that crawl around on branches…

Did you grow up in a political household? My parents met at Cambridge University in the ’50s in the Socialist Club, which was to the left of Labour, between the Communist Party and the Labour Party. Why did you join the Labour Party when you were 15? I joined the debating society at school when I was 11 and reported for the school newspaper. When I was 14, at Manchester Grammar School, I started reading the newspaper every day. For the 1974 elections, when I was 15 and 16, I helped the Labour Party. Why did you turn down the chance to become an MP? There was a possibility of applying to be a candidate on Merseyside. I discussed it with my wife, Margaret, and she didn’t fancy it. Also,…

They say you shouldn’t meet your heroes. But when I met – and frequently played against – Peter Weichsel of California, now in his ninth decade, I was not disappointed. Fortunately, I was not overawed either, and recall taking him for 800 at the two-level on a part-score deal when neither my partner at the time (this was back in the eighties) Oliver Segal nor I had a fourth trump. Weichsel was a Vietnam veteran who partook in the 1960s San Francisco counterculture. His recent autobiographical book, Bridge’s First Hippie, is a fascinating read for bridge junkies and non-junkies alike. Here is Weichsel at the helm from over 50 years ago. Plan the play in 4♠ on ♥K lead. Dealer West North-South Vunerable Pleased to have avoided a spade lead…

Joy of marital sex Q When I read about the woman who has refused sex with her husband ever since they were married (Spring issue), I got very cross! He says they’ve always been close – does she know what that implies? I wonder. ‘Not interested in sex?’ What does she think marriage vows are about? This poor suffering man is shut out of intimacy because SHE has decided. She’s selfish and mean. Love means sacrifices, sometimes. What’s wrong with sex occasionally – caring and loving, careful sex? Men have needs, and this poor chap has been forced to go elsewhere to satisfy a basic human need by sordid (in his mind) secretive encounters, and feels guilty. She is jolly lucky this kind man hasn’t left her. Why is loving…

FRANCIS OF ASSISI THE LIFE OF A RESTLESS SAINT VOLKER LEPPIN Yale University Press, 296pp, £20 The author is professor of historical theology at Yale Divinity School, and, as Nadya Williams in Christianity Today, wrote, he ‘reminds us that the church’s saints still retain a powerful grip on our hearts and minds’. Costica Bradatan in the TLS explained how Francis (c.1181-1226) was born into wealth and ‘was expected to join his father’s prosperous textile business until, one day, struck by an encounter with the Gospels … Francis stripped himself of everything’ and ‘embarked on a life of begging and scraping’ becoming ‘the model for a spirituality rooted in poverty, non-possession and the rejection of money’. Bradatan thought the book ‘complex, multilayered and ambitious’.‘Every biographer of Francis must wrestle with the…

As a jobbing writer of 40-odd years standing, I’ve produced all manner of non-fiction, as well as churning out reams of journalistic fodder. Somehow I’ve made a decent living out of it all and I’m duly thankful. But ever since my school magazine rejected my ‘exciting’ story about an escape from a prisoner-of-war camp, I have suspected that I am no good at making things up. I could no more write a half decent poem than I could paint the Sistine Chapel; I can’t conjure up brilliant puns or Dorothy Parker one-liners. I hope I don’t plod, but I know I can’t fly. About ten years ago, this realisation left me in a rut. I was solidly middle aged, doing fine, but I knew if I didn’t give myself a…

THE AGE OF DIAGNOSIS SICKNESS, HEALTH AND WHY MEDICINE HAS GONE TOO FAR SUZANNE O'SULLIVAN Hodder Press, 320pp, £22 NO MORE NORMAL MENTAL HEALTH IN AN AGE OF OVERDIAGNOSIS DR ALASTAIR SANTHOUSE Granta, 272pp, £18.99 The DSM – bible of the psychiatric profession, whose taxonomy of mental illnesses determines (among other things) whether insurance companies will pay for treatment in the US – wrote Hannah Barnes in the New Statesman, has filled out a bit over the last few decades: ‘The manual’s first edition in 1952 listed 106 diagnoses across 132 pages. DSM-V, the latest full update, published in 2013, contains nearly 300 diagnoses; its 947 pages are “thick enough to stop a bullet”, according to one psychiatrist.’ The result has been, some believe, an epidemic of over-diagnosis, with more…

The Bible Society recently published a report, The Quiet Revival, in which it found that churchgoing among young people in England and Wales was growing. It also reported that churchgoers are more likely to experience higher life satisfaction than nonchurchgoers. And in her new book Don’t Forget We’re Here Forever: A New Generation’s Search for Religion (Bloomsbury, 352pp, £22), Lamorna Ash ‘decided to find out for herself what’s happening to Christianity in Britain’, wrote Catherine Pepinster in the Telegraph. ‘Armed with innate curiosity, honed by her studies as an anthropologist, Ash ventured into the unknown to report back on the cultures and tribes, totems and taboos that come under the generic label of “Christianity in Britain today”’. She wrote down what she saw and the result is a ‘captivating narrative…

As those of you versed in the exploration of human-soul data must be aware, the home is an illuminating metaphor for the person in it. If the didactic tone of the above hints at intimate acquaintance with psychotherapy, that misleads. Here, as in all facets of human existence other than incompetent parking, unsuccessful gambling and the wasting of time, I speak from a standpoint of total ignorance. I do however have the twin abilities to type words into a search box and read whatever the AI tool churns out in response. Thus I can state that the notion of house as reflection of psyche is popular in psychotherapy, and that Carl Jung himself had much to say on the matter. In a sense, and not to brag, I have a…

For decades, I’ve bristled at the term ‘little old lady’. It’s so carelessly used – by broadcasters too – to bundle up a whole spectrum of individual lives into a class that’s faintly risible and certainly dismissible. When I think of the older women I’ve known, their very different interests honed by perspective, their accrued wisdoms and the witness they bring to history through memory, that implied assumption of equivalent shrinkage between body and wit is a downright insult. But, now, I have to accept it. A little old lady is what I’ve become. I was once 5 foot 4½ – and more in heels. Now, at 81, I’m 5 foot 2 – on a good day. This came to me with a shock of realisation the other day at…

As a boy in Edinburgh in the 1950s, I was captivated by the acts at the Bertram Mills Circus. I especially liked the plate-spinners, whose curiously tortuous routine had a hypnotic effect on the audience. The Filipinos who juggled cigar boxes and two teams of footballing boxer dogs were also favourites. And so, from an early age, I developed a keen interest in the novelty act. Throughout history, bizarre, ludicrous and often painful acts have been performed. In 1870, Joseph Pujol (1857-1945) discovered, aged 13, he could ingest air through his rectum and expel it at will. And so was born his flatulist act – he was known as Le Pétomane. In 1892, at the Moulin Rouge in Paris, he delivered cannon fire and thunderstorms via his bottom. He played…

The issue of reusing graves is a sensitive subject. But, given the number of people who have ever lived (and died), it’s one that societies have to tackle. For centuries, churchyards accommodated the dead of their parish in a tiny amount of space. Successive generations were buried on top of one another, with the remains of their predecessors lowered further down into the grave or removed to a charnel house. It was a sustainable solution until the massive growth in population in the late-18th century. The Victorians responded with the idea of large urban cemeteries offering private family graves where members could be buried together. Rights of burial were granted in perpetuity. Yet families often proved more mobile and less keen on maintaining a single burial place than anticipated, and…

We no longer need to talk about Kevin. School shootings are no longer the primary focus when we think about disaffected young men. We now need to talk about Jamie. Jamie is the protagonist of the television show Adolescence which shook audiences the length and breadth of the land. It really needed to be seen before it was talked about, as the gradual unravelling of the truth about Katie’s murder, and Jamie’s involvement, were all the more powerful without the pundits’ preloaded views dancing round the edges of our minds. The four-part series explored the frankly frightening power of social media over the lives of young boys, most especially their attitudes to women. We have all heard of the vile Andrew Tate, and we need to be aware that the…

Near my nest in Shepherd’s Bush is a gigantic shopping centre called Westfield. Until recently, I was accustomed, like the other middle-class people in my neighbourhood, to criticising Westfield as a hideous, sterile, overheated monument to crass consumerism. After all, most of it is indoors and the 320 shops within its cavernous interior are all chains: Armani, Boss, W H Smith, Sports Direct and so on. It’s an outpost of the Brave New World: an airport without the planes, right on my doorstep, with advertising screens and a multi-screen cinema to keep you entertained after shopping. And where is the field of its name? Like many of these modern developments, it’s named after the very thing it destroyed. Where there were fields, there is now concrete and a giant car…

I hope the Prime Minister’s ‘great reset’ with the EU will eventually reach the postal services. Countless small businesses have struggled with the bureaucracy of sending goods to Europe. I’ve almost given up on postal dispatches to Ireland because of the vexations involved (let alone the cost). Last year, I tried to send a package of books – mainly poetry, history and religious content – as a gift to a voluntary library in Dublin. The postage cost £25 and the documentation required was voluminous – it took the postal clerk ten minutes to fill in the paperwork. Eventually, the package was returned to me by the Irish/EU customs, with a note attached referring to ‘insufficient documentation’. Honestly, once people couldn’t send condoms to Ireland. Now it’s a struggle to send…

A service of thanksgiving was held at Westminster Cathedral for the Marquess of Lothian, known when he was an MP as Michael Ancram. Deputy Leader of the Conservatives from 2001 to 2005, he fought for the leadership unsuccessfully in 2001. The service was led by Bishop James Curry, auxiliary bishop of Westminster. Sir Malcom Rifkind, former Foreign Secretary, recalled being at the family seat, Monteviot House, near Jedburgh, when Michael on the guitar and his father Peter Lothian on the piano sang folk songs. Ancram nearly became a victim of the IRA bomb in Brighton in 1984. He later became a key figure in the negotiations that led to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. Sir John Major, who was at the service, recounted in his memoirs how skilfully Michael moved…

It’s awful when a child goes to live thousands of miles away. But that was 30 years ago now, when my first-born, Emily Wilson, went to Yale to do a PhD. It never crossed my mind, at the time, that she was leaving England for ever, and the slow dawning of realisation remains a gnawing, everlasting ache. For more than two decades, she has been a professor in Philadelphia (UPenn – Ezra Pound’s alma mater) and I visit her and the children as often as I can. That cheesy song is true – ‘Every time I say goodbye, I die a little’. Or, probably, in her case, since she teaches Ancient Greek, that should read ‘die a Liddell’ – after Liddell and Scott. The surprise, over the years, is the…

In 1977, Belfast was a boom town – for all the wrong reasons. I was a schoolboy on my summer holidays, looking for a job. Liam Neeson was a struggling actor looking for a break. My friend heard about a film that was being made locally. In Troubles-torn Northern Ireland, long before Game of Thrones, this was incredible. Films were made in Hollywood, California – not Northern Ireland. I didn’t know a gaffer from a best boy, but we could earn some money helping with the props during a few days’ shooting at the Ulster Folk Museum which, ironically, was in the outskirts of Holywood, County Down. The film, Pilgrim’s Progress, involved lots of spiritual strife and misdirection. One of the Christians, Faithful, was to be burnt at the stake and…

The Lady in the Park By David Reynolds Muswell Press £10.99 ‘The idea of a lone gumshoe working on his own is a romantic fantasy dreamed up by writers like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.’ So says ex-Detective Chief Inspector Jim Domino, the very model of a modern private eye. Jim works out every day and knows ‘that tingle in my arms that means a thrill and danger’. But, unlike Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade, he wouldn’t dream of confronting a villain without back-up. He can read a spreadsheet, but employs a bookkeeper to unravel the esoteric chicaneries of money-laundering. And, although he left the Met under a bit of a cloud – for bending the rules to get a result – he’s on good terms with his former colleagues…

‘Humankind cannot bear very much reality,’ said T S Eliot. The most unbearable reality show on television, by a country mile, is Couples Therapy (BBC2). This award-winning series is so much more real than real life that it can be watched only from behind the sofa or between the fingers. It must never, in any circumstances, be watched by couples. Instead of the usual self-preening narcissists who wash up on these tell-all programmes, on this one people mired in cycles of misery inflict maximum damage on one another. ‘Most people who come into therapy,’ explains Dr Orna Guralnik, the Manhattan analyst who has become the unlikely star of the show, ‘have a story they tell themselves that helps them make sense of their life. The therapist is recruited to be…

BACK TO BASICS ‘We have more than enough masterpieces,’ wrote the great Jane Grigson, author of English Food. ‘What we need is a better standard of ordinariness.’ Quite so. Happily for the revival of simple cooking, Mrs G’s Good Things (1971), a collection of personal favourites, has just reappeared from Grub Street as a handsome hardback. Ingredient-based, seasonal, her choices are often surprising – six recipes for snails (à la bourguignonne et al), seven for chicory (braised, curried), eight for venison (civet, soup). Naturally for a Gloucestershire Midlander, her pastry-and-pies section includes a hot-water crust for a raised pork pie, and a classic English, all-purpose lard-and-butter shortcrust. Mrs Grigson's shortcrust pastry To line and top a 2-pint pie dish or loaf tin, rub together 1lb plain flour and ½ tsp…

STRANGE DEATH OF FOOTBALL I’ve just been granted a vision of the future – the very near future. I was at Stamford Bridge, watching Chelsea in a Premier League game. Next to the press box is the family stand, at the back of which is a refreshment bar. And there three consoles had been installed by the company backing a bestselling football computer game, to advertise their latest edition; to provide a bit of half-time distraction. But midway through the second half, being of advancing years, I took a quick diversion to the lavatory. I passed a group of kids still playing on the screens – even though the game had been underway for some time. A small crowd had gathered round each screen, with a couple of youngsters peering…

There was a very welcome lack of digital interference in the papal conclave that elected Pope Leo XIV. Before entering the Sistine Chapel, all the cardinals had to surrender anything electronic – phones, laptops, iPads. Voting was done using pen and paper. Even the traditional means of passing on the news, white or black smoke, showed a complete disregard for modern technology, the internet or dreaded artificial intelligence. I wonder how much this contributed to the speed with which the decision was reached (only a couple of days) and what we can learn from it. Webwatch For my latest tips and free newsletter, go to www.askwebster.co.uk Glastonbury webcam bbc.co.uk/events/glastonbury/webcam Remind yourself why you’re glad you didn’t go. Wimbledon wimbledon.com Up-to-the-second scores and straightforward audio commentary of matches. I will happily…

IN COMPETITION No 320 you were invited to write a poem called Ripe. It was a tasty glut of an entry. Clare Morris wrote in the voice of a ripe Somerset Brie: ‘Come, pierce my soft, suppliant crust,/ To spill my contents, as indeed you must.’ Ian Higgins described the inside of a pomegranate as ‘a wasps’ nest/ Flush with shrapnel and juice’. Claudette Evans celebrated Wimbledon strawberries: ‘No berry, no summer, no love in the game.’ Gillian Pugh was among those with a common complaint in the supermarket: ‘My fruit just isn’t ripe.’ Commiserations to them and to Robert Best, Michael Turner, David Bailey, Steve Keightley, D A Prince, Bill Webster, Sue Smalley, Alan Bradwell, Bob Morrow, Bill Greenwell, Anthony Young and Jenny Jones, and congratulations to those printed…

Issue 72 Summer 2025 Not forgetting important titles recently reviewed in The Oldie Behind the Scenes by Angela V John Bird School by Adam Nicolson Affairs by Juliet Rosenfeld When the Going was Good by Graydon Carter Men of a Certain Age by Kate Mossman Lost in the Forest by Caroline Heber-Percy When the Carry On Stopped by Dave Ainsworth Lady Pamela Berry by Harriet Cullen Of Thorn & Briar by Paul Lamb God is an Englishman by Bijan Omrani The Combative Life of Douglas Cooper, Collector and Friend of Picasso by Adrian Clark and Richard Calvocoressi The Sun Rising by Anna Whitelock Electric Spark by Frances Wilson Is a River Alive? by Robert Macfarlane Buckley by Sam Tanenhaus The Buried City by Gabriel Zuchtriegel London Clubland by Seth Alexander…

Even the most belligerently secular branches of modern media get excited about a papal election. The sequestered cardinals in their red garb, the black smoke, the white smoke and finally the ‘habemus papam’ from the balcony: it’s gripping in its mysterious unchangingness; there’s nothing else in modern life quite like it. A novelist who takes on the papacy has material for two or three trilogies at least. Robert Harris, author of Conclave, is of course the master of recreating the lethal drip-feed of the fight for political power. And because he had researched the mysteries of papal politics with his usual thoroughness, even with the somewhat random twist at the end of its tale, Conclave delivered a vivid depiction of ambition in an institution in which the meek must be…

TWIST COLUM McCANN Bloomsbury, 256pp, £18.99 John Conway, free-diving engineer, travels the world fixing undersea cables carrying data around our hyperconnected planet. Narrator, Anthony Fennell, an Irish journalist on feature assignment declares, ‘others have tried to tell Conway’s story, and so far as I know, they got it largely wrong.’ For the Guardian’s Marcel Theroux this ‘intense maritime story with echoes of Heart of Darkness’ is timely: ‘Experts have been warning for a while that our globalised lives depend on these links to a degree that few have considered.’ ‘For many chapters,’ wrote Ron Charles in the Washington Post, ‘Anthony’s obsession with Conway seems entirely out of proportion to the person we see on the page. But clearly, in Conway’s rise and fall, Anthony seeks an understanding of his own…

BOOKISH HOW READING SHAPES OUR LIVES LUCY MANGAN Square Peg, 304pp, £18.99 ‘If we stop reading, we stop putting ourselves in other people’s shoes,’ writes Lucy Mangan in Bookish, the sequel to her 2018 Bookworm. ‘Books offer a wealth of experience; more adventures, more lifetimes.’ In Bookworm she showed how literature helped her navigate the mysteries of her childhood, and, in Bookish, how literature navigated her through school, university, a first job, motherhood and bereavement. The Guardian’s Nick Duerden enjoyed the premise: Mangan is ‘voracious in her tastes, and consumes everything from Victorian classics to airport thrillers to the genre that used to be called chick-lit. Each in their own way has taught her how to live.’ He appreciated her artfulness: ‘She makes for a wonderfully incisive critic and can…

No searches for missing man this week Oxford Times Man kept awake by noisy manhole cover Dunfermline Press Former Coronation Street star spotted working ‘normal job’ after being axed Argus £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 A N Wilson. And we release three more podcasts on op 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…

WHAT WERE revolving restaurants? In a shuttered fairground site by the side of a motorway, in the industrial outskirts of Rotterdam, sits Europe’s newest revolving restaurant. Opened five years ago, the UfO is the invention of 75-year-old maverick Dutch entrepreneur Hennie van der Most. A former scrap-metal merchant, Van der Most believes the sky’s the limit for his 66-seater Dutch eatery. The UfO is not only the latest but probably the last revolving restaurant to rise in European skies. Since the start of this century, revolving restaurants are winding down. London’s great landmark the Post Office Tower (now BT Tower and Grade II listed) first pirouetted 60 years ago, in 1965. At 581 feet, the tower was the tallest building in Britain. Its silhouette was instantly recognisable – a symbol…

News travels quickly here in the Var, Provence. Within days of the young fishmonger’s starting work in the Intermarché supermarket six miles away, everyone abandoned our village store, Utile, and headed across to see what the fuss was about. I stood at the back of the fish-counter queue and watched. Yes, the WhatsApp messages were right. He was handsome: pale, twinkly blue eyes, a lovely mouth, a ready smile and good forearms. Chatty and knowledgeable: he held eye contact with each customer in turn and asked how they were before telling them what was fresh in that day and taking their order. He was generous with portions, too – sometimes adding a little extra for free and saying, ‘See you tomorrow?’ Was it shop charm or flirtatiousness? It didn’t matter.…

By rights, I should loathe Fray Bentos pies. Remember them? Greasy crust, like a lumpy duvet. Meat that needs a forensic eye. Gravy like a brownish tide after a water-company outflow. Then, unbelievably, the whole mass is squeezed into a tin the size of a frisbee. Its greatest virtue is that it costs less than three quid in Tesco: we are not talking Wagyu beef. Fray Bentos is a major city on the Argentine-Uruguay border – beef country. From 1899, it turned out corned beef, commemorated in a factory museum where Oxo cubes were also born. The pies are now made in Scotland. My greatest regret is that, sailing down that coast a few years ago, I didn’t head up the River Plate to pay formal tribute to Fray Bentos…

And now summer – the sartorial season to celebrate. We can pause the itchiness and heaviness of wool or tweed and the rustlings of gilets by day. We are spared the restrictions of stiffened satin and thermal layerings by night. The freedom! And what does the oldie woman wear once the thermometer climbs? The uniform, of course. At the Chelsea Flower Show and a fundraising lunch in the Cavalry and Guards Club in May, almost every woman wore a floral-print mid-calf 100-per-cent cotton dress. And why not? The classic Sloane/boho summer dress – which must be made of cotton or linen – is the nearest thing in comfort to a nightdress. Universally flattering, practical and cool, with the right accessories to dress it up or down, could it be your…

The fact that it’s Mary’s birthday doesn’t mean I have to spare her a firm but fair mansplanation of why I believe my wife to be, if not the world’s worst shopper, a curate’s egg of a shopper. There are fresh lessons to be learnt daily from her better half. First up: full marks for not going to the Co-op again. That brace of sustainably caught North Atlantic cod had about as much flavour as a Kleenex tissue. Congrats for going to Lidl, this time, but nul points for buying asparagus spears from Peru rather than from this country, and nul points for buying a Rainforest Alliance product – peppermint tea bags. We already have real garden mint coming out of our ears in our own one-acre Nature Recovery Zone.…

A former colleague – in the hospital where I worked – called the scans to which patients are now routinely subjected ‘the answering machines’. This was not meant as a compliment to the technology. It was a lament about the loss in younger doctors of the skills of physical examination of their patients and of logical deduction therefrom. It had taken him a lot of time and trouble to acquire these skills, and now they were almost redundant. Under the new dispensation, a patient arrived in the hospital, was scanned and received a diagnosis, rather as someone who puts money in a vending machine receives a bar of chocolate. No need for thought or reflection. Bitterness about changes in the way working methods have changed is not confined to the…

A few years ago, I was chatting to a Civil War camp follower. She was a Parliamentarian, judging from her sober attire – palette black with a few touches of white. ‘So,’ I asked, ‘are you part of the Sealed Knot?’ Stupid question. The Sealed Knot is Britain’s oldest historical re-enactment society, devoted to re-creation of the battles of the Civil War, from Edgehill to Worcester. But it is far from the only one. I was talking to a member of a completely different group of Civil War re-enactors. ‘We hate the Sealed Knot,’ she told me, raising the intriguing possibility of Civil War re-enactment actually leading to another civil war. The occasion was the Chalke History Festival, that glorious annual celebration in the Wiltshire countryside of the past and…

There is no such thing as the pursuit of happiness, but there is the discovery of joy. Joyce Grenfell The ladder of success in Hollywood is usually a press agent, actor, director, producer, leading man; and you are a star if you sleep with each of them in that order. Crude, but true. Hedy Lamarr He may have hair upon his chest but, sister, so has Lassie. Cole Porter Good advice is always certain to be ignored, but that’s no reason not to give it. Agatha Christie You only have one go at life, which is thrilling. Only you can make yourself into who you want to be. Don’t blame anybody else. You are entitled to free fresh air, and that’s it. Do the rest yourself. Joanna Lumley Childhood is,…

IN PRAISE OF LOVE Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond, On stage until 5th July Online, 8th to 11th July ‘Do you know what le vice anglais – the English vice – really is? ‘Not flagellation; not pederasty – whatever the French believe it to be. It’s our refusal to admit to our emotions. We think they demean us.’ That stirring cri de coeur sums up the essence of this profound, neglected play – and the essence of its profound, neglected author, Terence Rattigan (1911-77). From the 1930s to the 1950s, Rattigan bestrode Shaftesbury Avenue like a colossus. Knighted for his service to the stage, he still enjoys an avid following among theatregoers of a certain age. His masterpiece, The Deep Blue Sea, has just been playing to full houses (and admiring…

DINNER ON MOUNT OLYMPUS In the pantheon of British restaurant immortals, Auguste Escoffier is Jupiter. Madame Prunier is Juno. Vulcan is Rowley Leigh. Elena Salvoni is Minerva. Neptune is Rick Stein. Apollo is Jeremy King. And Mercury? Giorgio Locatelli. After serving his apprenticeship at his uncle’s restaurant on the shore of Lake Comabbio, in northern Italy, Giorgio arrived in London in 1986, aged 23, where he worked in the kitchens of the Savoy. He then moved to Paris to work at Tour d’Argent but was soon drawn back to London, not least by Plaxy, his future wife and business partner. Depressed by the mediocrity of the dishes at the spaghetti tree of London restaurants planted by Mario and Franco at Trattoria Terrazza in 1959, they opened Zafferano, which could genuinely…

LIFE IN THE VERY FAST LANE The Millbrook Proving Ground is a 700-acre site in Bedfordshire where most drivers may not go. Founded by Vauxhall and now owned by a private company, it is a testing site used by all manner of vehicle manufacturers, British and foreign. It comprises: enclosed crash facilities, into which you may not even peep; various circuits, including a two-mile banked bowl; a hill circuit with corners that hurl you sideways; flat circuits with varying surfaces, cambers, cobbles and kerb heights; pot-holed (ie normal) roads; skid pans; and a straight mile to test you and your car’s control under rapid acceleration and braking. Entry is normally restricted to industry insiders, but it is bookable by private individuals wanting to thrash their new toys. I went some…

Even by the standards of Oldie-readers, Warren Buffett has had a pretty good innings. For the last 60 years, he has been running Berkshire Hathaway, and even now he is not really retiring. At 94, he has admitted for the first time that even he is not immune from anno domini. Apparently this feeling started only once he hit 90, and he fears that it is irreversible. As every Oldie-reader will know, he is probably the most successful investor of all time. Berkshire has made him, and those clever enough to follow him early enough, absurdly rich, compounding invested capital at an average rate of 20 per cent a year, or twice the US market average. Berkshire also upended the idea of dividends. It paid out only once, and then…

PATRICK BARKHAM Googling ‘wild swimming Northumberland’ conjured up a promising-looking place called Featherstone Castle. Checking the OS map on my phone, it also seemed like a decent spot for a stroll because I could walk up the west side of the river, cross a footbridge and return on the east side. The map also showed ‘Sewage Farm (disused)’ – that’s all right, then – and, more mysteriously, ‘Campsite (disused)’. What was a disused campsite? An apocalyptic scene of fraying pole-and-ridge tents and ivy-covered caravans, abandoned since the ’60s? I had to find out. It had been grey all day as I travelled north, but the forecast implausibly predicted glorious sunshine by the time I reached Hadrian’s Wall. The forecasting gods were correct. The clouds parted west of Newcastle and another…

For many, summer holidays involve outdoor activity from swimming and boating to hiking, cycling and riding. But, for readers, it’s more likely to comprise the joy of settling down in the shade with a cool drink and a good book. Reassuringly, this edition is full of good new books. John Walsh picks perennial favourites for pool or seaside reading. In the wake of Conclave the movie and the real conclave to elect Pope Leo XIV, Lucy Lethbridge suggests some fascinating books about the papacy. New memoirs include books on Paul and John and Yoko, Francis of Assisi, Anne Frank and William Sargant, the monstrous doctor who induced narcosis in his notorious ‘sleep rooms’. New history offerings include Max Hastings’s Sword, Tim Bouverie’s lauded Allies at War and the second part…

‘More wisdom is contained in the best crime fiction than in all philosophy.’ Andrew Taylor prefaces A Schooling in Murder (Hemlock Press, 376pp, £20.00), with an assertion by Wittgenstein. Since the philosopher also said, ‘Whereof one does not know, thereof one should not speak’, we must take him at his word. But did he, I wonder, believe in ghosts? Taylor, a Crime Writing Association laureate, requires this of his readers, because the story is told by a spectral murderee in search of who pushed her off a cliff. The setting is a seedy girls’ boarding school near the Severn estuary 80 years ago. Annabel Warnock, a teaher there, has designs on a colleague that are thwarted by her murder. Much to her surprise Annabel undergoes a resurrection that enables her,…