Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2025 i The Oldie

Merlin Holland (p12) is Oscar Wilde's only grandchild. In this issue, he writes about his new book, After Oscar: The Legacy of a Scandal. He is author of The Wilde Album and The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde. John O'Sullivan (p26), Margaret Thatcher's special adviser (1986-8) and speechwriter, helped her write her memoirs. He wrote The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister. Nicholas Garland (p27) was the Daily Telegraph cartoonist, 1966-2011. With Barry Humphries, he created Barry McKenzie for Private Eye. He worked at the Royal Court and has just turned 90. Peter York (p34) co-wrote The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook (1982) and wrote Dictators’ Homes (2005). He financed Modern Review and co-founded SRU, the management consultants.…

Greetings from the BBC Breakfast green room in Salford. I am on air at 7.50am, with seven minutes’ plugging time between the sport and the weather. I am on the road again, flogging my latest book, from St Austell to St Andrews. Ilkley next stop. I've been doing this, year in, year out, for over half a century. My first book was published in 1972. It was not a great success. Unsurprisingly. Called Created in Captivity, it was a book about prison reform. It sold 837 copies. Not bad really, when you consider the subject matter. In 1973, my next book (Brandreth's Party Games) did rather better. It had broader appeal and a publisher (Geoffrey Strachan at Eyre Methuen) who taught me the value of taking your wares on the…

WHAT IS a Labubu? Labubu is a furry creature with pointy ears, large eyes and a mouth filled with many sharp teeth. It was dreamt up in 2015 by Hong Kong-born illustrator Kasing Lung as part of a series called The Monsters, and turned into a series of vinyl plush dolls by Chinese toy company Pop Mart. Pop Mart has released over 300 different Labubu dolls in this calendar year alone, ranging from £14 Labubu pendants to larger dolls, on sale for £80. People have brawled, kicked and scrapped to get their hands on these things. After a bloody riot at a Pop Mart outlet in east London in May, the company announced they would now sell the items only online. This has, naturally, further increased demand. ‘It's a battlefield,’…

Parties are useful literary devices. They contain their own internal plots – a beginning, a middle and an end – which make them ideal vehicles for short stories or set pieces in novels. They're often the defining scene of the narrative. What is Rebecca without Mrs de Winter's humiliating entrance to the fancy-dress ball? Or Pride and Prejudice without Lizzie and Darcy's first meeting at Meryton? Parties provide scaffolding to stories just as in life. The writer Jhumpa Lahiri describes them as ‘parentheses’, akin to holidays or other journeys that punctuate the humdrum of ordinary existence. Looking back at parties past, most people can identify one or two seminal moments on which their life has hinged and found stuffing, whether it's meeting a future spouse or simply the seeding of…

Nearly a quarter of a century after Mary Whitehouse's death, it's striking what a national figure she remains. There's always another documentary, study or drama about the late moral crusader and alleged prude. Most recently, Maxine Peake has dazzled in Sarah Frankcom's play The Last Stand of Mrs Mary Whitehouse. I interviewed La Whitehouse (1910-2001) a few times, and she was far from being a prude. Indeed, she could flick through magazines showing quite alarming porn, with down-to-earth pragmatism. The first time I met her, I wrote a confidently youthful piece challenging her censorious view of sexual freedom and ‘smutty’ TV comedy. ‘You've missed the point,’ my editor Charles Wintour reprimanded. ‘Here's a provincial housewife who has beaten the system! She has the BBC on the defensive!’ Oh yes –…

Wrinkles around the eyes are a major gripe – even in one's early thirties. And yet you can do so much, first to prevent them from taking root, and then to delay their embedding. All the measures below are completely cost-free. Avoid sunbeds Morale is raised following a sunbed session. We are transformed, like a wall given a lick of paint. But we should avoid the salons like the plague. Sunbeds accelerate skin-ageing and the development of fine lines particularly around the eyes. California tan peepers – commonly used – absurdly only protect the eyeball. Yet the charity Melanoma Focus found in 2024 that 28 per cent of Britons are still beating a path to the salon doors. Belfast, of all places, is the sunbed capital of the UK. Think…

The Requiem Mass for the Duchess of Kent took place at her beloved Westminster Cathedral. The King was there – the first time he had attended a requiem mass in England. The Apostolic Nuncio read a message of sympathy addressed to him and to the family, from Pope Leo XIV. The Duchess's coffin had been piped to the Advance Gates of Kensington Palace the day before by Pipe Major Andrew Rayment from the Royal Dragoon Guards, of which she was Deputy Colonel-in-Chief. This nice tradition was observed for Princess Margaret and Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester, both of whom lived at the palace. The coffin was received at the cathedral and rested overnight in the Chapel of the Blessed Virgin Mary, with pre-funeral rites attended by the immediate members of…

In 1955, I left school at 15 and went to work as a ‘junior’ in a high-class gentlemen's outfitters in Eastbourne. Very little was on show for a customer to touch. Most things were tucked away in boxes or glass-fronted drawers. Trousers were folded in three, in piles according to size; all in shades of grey, with just one pile of lovat green and fawn. The customer sat at the counter and the requested items were brought out. The bane of my life were the dreaded hosiery packets. They contained underwear neatly folded between two pieces of glossy white cardboard, secured by two crossbands of white string. No plastic anywhere. Stored on a shelf, they had to have the label showing, with the white string lined up exactly in the…

Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines By Karine Jean-Pierre Grand Central Publishing £25 When I was a fresh-faced trainee at America's CBS network 45 years ago, journalists were still by and large like old-fashioned messenger boys. Here was a piece of news, there was the public, and your job was to ensure that the one was delivered to the other in as efficient and courteous a way as possible. The idea of personally imposing yourself on the transaction was unthinkable. To employ diffidence and self-restraint was as mandatory then as, it seems, some form of cloaca-tongued exhibitionism is today. Of course, our fall from the ideal of Reithian gravitas can't be laid entirely at the door of Karine Jean-Pierre, 51, President Biden's voluble White…

Internet overload For the first 50 years of my life, I managed perfectly well without a mobile phone, the internet, Facebook, Google, Instagram, X, TikTok, emails, websites or online publications. Now I can't survive for a minute without them. When my broadband connection went down recently, taking everything with it, I discovered I could no longer operate. I could not send or receive emails, do research or order or read anything online. All my expensive high-tech up-to-the-minute devices suddenly became useless, and I was stranded. I had articles to write, deadlines to meet, bills to pay, friends to contact. I couldn't even book a concert, or a session at the gym. What had gone wrong? My broadband-provider said my existing router had died, and I needed a new one. This…

The Reunion, on the removal of hereditary peers from the House of Lords in 1999, was pulsing with drama. The Blair government had pledged in 1997 to boot out this medieval relic. The Welsh call it a crachach, as Ann Beynon told us: an elitist, entitled Establishment gang with an inbuilt Tory majority. Among the guests were two old hereditaries: Tom (Earl of) Strathclyde, and the Earl of Burford, heir to the Duke of St Albans, descendant of Nell Gwyn and Charles II. Charlie Falconer, Blair's first peer and former flatmate, said he found himself charmed by the noble lords and the ‘languid arrogance’ of their manner. (One, hearing Charlie was a lawyer, pulled a crumpled parking ticket from his pocket and asked for Charlie's help.) Baroness Jay, known in…

When was rock nostalgia invented? Maybe 1966? An album called A Collection of Beatles Oldies (But Goldies!) appeared that Christmas, which was pretty rich as two of the tracks, repackaged as ‘past classics’, had first appeared on Revolver only four months earlier. Maybe it was at the Concert for Bangladesh in 1971, when Bob Dylan played just five songs from the early to mid-'60s and nothing contemporary. That was understandable – charity shows need tunes people recognise. Whatever – the concept of Greatest Hits had arrived. At this point, a tension emerged between touring acts and the audiences paying handsomely to see them. The crowd mainly wanted familiar songs; the bands, bored of playing them, wanted to flog their new records. And there's a limit to how many times you…

I sowed two rows of perpetual spinach, more correctly called leaf beet, in the spring and, unlike so many vegetables this year, they have flourished through the summer of drought and into autumn. Because I used seed tapes, the plants did not need thinning and had the space to grow vigorously and continue to grow – with frequent cutting of the leaves. I have had leaves this year more than 12 inches in length. No bolting occurred during the hottest dry spells this summer, and I began to think it might really be perpetual. A dormant period during the winter should precede new growth next spring until the plants finally run to seed. This spinach is so much hardier, and more rewarding to grow, than the so-called summer spinach, which…

The UK's apple harvest this year is a bumper crop, the best for many years. It's great news for cider-makers, producers of what the 17th-century botanist and diarist John Evelyn called ‘the native wine of England’. Evelyn was not referring to the industrially produced ciders that populate supermarket shelves. Cider needs an apple content of only 35 per cent to earn its name. There is no obligation for producers to use cider apple varieties, or even any fresh apples: apple concentrate is both permissible and widely used. Sugar is allowed as well, so that cider can be made to a high alcoholic strength – a process called chaptalisation – to prolong its storage life; it's then diluted before bottling. Colourings, flavourings and sweeteners are also permitted: it is a very…

Surrounded, as we are, by the incessant digitalisation of our world, change seems almost compulsory. What a relief that one thing remains stubbornly unmoved by these pressures – the keyboard I am using to generate these words. Apart from getting smaller, typewriters didn't change much until the birth of the electric machine in the 1960s and the early computers with screens, which we called word processors. A rather ugly name – but then I suppose we are all processing words in one way or another. These electric machines supplanted the manual typewriters in no time. They transformed the creation of documents. Mistakes could be corrected without paper being wasted. You could print as many identical copies as you wanted without the need for that awful carbon paper which blighted office…

The secretive and diminutive winter migrant jack snipe (Lymnocryptes minimus) has been reckoned the UK's most elusive and least understood bird. At its smallest, it's only between one and two and a half ounces. The migration of 110,000 snipe, mostly from Russia, places it in the UK's green category of ‘least conservation concern’. That elusiveness is now being transformed by technology. Knowledge of the snipe's habits and movements has been transformed by the thermal camera and a tracker – so small, at one gram, that it can be carried by the little bird. Thermal cameras have for some years revealed the daytime hideaways and nocturnal feeding of jack snipe. As a result, from 2000 to 2015, an average of 120 were ringed annually in the UK. In 2023 that figure…

Did you act as a child? Not until I was about 11 or 12. I became aware of wanting to perform at school doing English O level, when the teacher would say, ‘Who's going to read this Keats for us? You'd see people cringing, and I'd always be thinking, ‘Please choose me.’ And I had a wonderful drama teacher who asked if I'd like to be in the end-of-term play and I said, ‘No, I'm a footballer.’ She gave me Scrooge's nephew in A Christmas Carol, and I loved it. Is it because you went to Leeds University that you support Leeds United? No – I went to Leeds University because I supported Leeds. Did you go to acting school? The Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Of whom did…

One of the great privileges Í had as a civilian lecturer at the Royal Militaiy Academy Sandhurst for 25 years was meeting influential people in the Officers’ Mess. One of them was the Duke of Kent, who turned 90 on 9th October [see page 48 for the requiem mass for his wife, the late Duchess of Kent]. The Duke was a militaiy instructor at Sandhurst for two years in the 1970S. I made an awful gaffe when another colleague, Major John Blashford-Snell, tasked me to invite the Duke to a party John was giving – and ask whether he'd like to bring his wife. I asked the Duke, ‘Would you be able to come with the Duchess of Windsor?’ ‘Well,’ he said, ‘she's getting on a bit and now lives…

When the Christmas feast happens, and whether it's in the middle of the day or the evening, depends on family traditions and who has the upper hand in the household. Ours were dictated by my mother-in-law, a middle-of-the-day woman, who sent everyone out for a brisk walk after luncheon before the Queen's speech. With my parents, we sat down to turkey and all the trimmings in the evening. But since we were usually geographically far from England – my stepfather was a diplomat on the Latin American circuit – everything necessary to celebrate an English Christmas was ordered from Harrods and delivered readyprepared in the diplomatic bag. Married at just 21, with four children born in quick succession, I moved my family, lock, stock and barrel, to a remote valley…

Yet again, Gruffalo-creator Julia Donaldson heroically steps up to the plate with the perfect Christmas present for the under-fives. Gozzle (Macmillan, £12.99) with enchanting illustrations by Sara Ogilvie, is the story of a bear who finds an egg which (spoiler alert) hatches a gosling. There's another novel out by master storyteller William Boyd. Predicament (Viking, £20) is his second Cold War espionage novel starring accidental spy Gabriel Dax. In this one he uncovers a plot to assassinate the charismatic young John F Kennedy. Revenge of Odessa (Bantam, £22) by Frederick Forsyth is the (very) long-awaited sequel to The Odessa File, published in 1972. Forsyth died this summer aged 86 so there is an added poignancy to the appearance of this novel, set in 2025, in a world vastly different than…

Veil cover cream The famous plastic surgeon Sir Archibald McIndoe identified the need for a skin camouflage product when treating RAF burns victims during World War II. The Guinea Pig Club volunteered to test the products knocked up by the chemist Thomas Blake. Veil Cover Cream is the modern day result, and proper victims have been able to get it on prescription from the NHS since 1975. However, for vanity purposes, it provides all-day coverage for acne, birthmarks, scars and tattoos. You can only buy it from John Bell & Croydon. So send off for a £7.49 matching kit and ten trial shades, with £5 off your eventual purchase of £22.49 veilcovercream.co.uk Neck lift tapes My old friend Anne used a Bulldog Clip to pull back her neck when being…

As we get older, we may be able to enjoy spending more time in the garden, but too much stooping, crouching, kneeling and hard labour can take their toll. Here are some presents to help prolong an active gardening life Double deal The Clever Garden Tool Stool (below right)really is a toolbag and a stool all in one. It has a sturdy metal frame but is foldable and light to carry around. Its compartments can handle all your essential bits and pieces – and the seat will support you when you need to take the weight off. £33.99 gardeninggifts.co.uk Take a stand Even the fittest of us can sometimes do with a hand up after a stint of kneeling and planting or weeding. The Wubushan Standing Aid could be a…

When my mother died some two years ago, it seemed beyond the power of human imagination to conceive that the roads would ever again host so anxious and pernickety a passenger. ‘Stop driving like a lunatic – you're going to kill us’ was the automatic back-seat refrain whenever the speedometer nudged 17mph. ‘Swerve, swerve … for God's sake, SWERVE’ went her ritual injunction when she sighted a pigeon roosting insouciantly atop a post box on the other side of the road. It's a well-known paradox that what we tend to miss most about dead loved ones is whatever most drove us mad about them in life. So it was that, for 18 months after her departure, the eerie absence of neurotic warnings drew a veil of poignancy over outings on…

How does a son accuse his father of not telling the truth? With difficulty – normally, the roles are reversed. It's all the more difficult when you're having to do it publicly and in print – and he can't answer back because he died nearly 60 years ago. It's a problem that has often tortured me while I've been writing about my father, Vyvyan Holland, in After Oscar – my new book about the dramatic posthumous ‘life’ of his own father, Oscar Wilde, and the role he played in it. Oscar died in Paris 125 years ago, on 30th November 1900, aged 46. I was constantly having to weigh up filial love against an obsession with historical accuracy; and feeling terrible pangs of guilt when I allowed history to prevail…

When I began teaching in Keble Prep School, Enfield, in 1972, Ted Heath was Prime Minister and ‘educational technology’ meant a board that was black, a piece of chalk that was white and a felted rubber generally kept in an old Peek Frean biscuit tin. My pupils were required to supply: an HB pencil, a six-inch ruler, an eraser, an actual fountain pen and some cartridges or a bottle of Quink. Biros were frowned on. By the mid-'70s, blackboards had been replaced by green roller boards which could be written on on both sides and could be moved around the classroom for convenience. In this newly colourful age, pupils would sit enthralled as I illustrated the stages of a river's journey from source to sea via the thrillingly novel medium…

As the old saying goes, you should never work with children or animals. But what about the ultimate thespian taboo of playing a jackbooted Nazi? Remember the late Anthony Valentine's sadistically ruthless turn as Major Horst Mohn in Colditz (1972-4)? Although Valentine bounced back as the more congenial title villain in ITV's Raffles, he ruefully acknowledged that the Mohn character had clung to him. Even towards the end of his life, he admitted, he was greeted with incongruous cries of ‘Heil Hitler!’ when going out for a quiet drink around his home in Guildford. ‘People must see something a bit dodgy in me,’ the mild-mannered, cricket-playing Valentine remarked. ‘It's odd, because quite truthfully I feel just as warm and cuddly as the next guy.’ Then there's that versatile character actor…

I recently had a letter from a woman – let's call her Joan. She lives in an ‘assisted living’ block of flats. She has no friends (all dead) or family (all living abroad). No one in the building talks to her and the staff are young, foreign and don't speak English. When her husband was alive, he was gregarious and friendly, and they'd push their Zimmers to the local coffee shop and chat to strangers. But he's dead now. Her flat is expensive, and Joan pays the top whack plus charges for building maintenance and cleaning. She cannot afford help in her flat and does her own cooking, cleaning and laundry. She worries a lot about money. Joan has recently had a bad fall, banging her head against the wall.…

When Dr Johnson started his Literary Club in 1764, the members met at the Turk's Head at 9 Gerrard Street, just next to today's Leicester Square. It was a literary sort of area. Dryden had moved there in 1687 and there were loads of coffee houses where the wits of the day would gather. Johnson and his highly talented mates – David Garrick, Joshua Reynolds, Oliver Goldsmith, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, Edward Gibbon, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith and Boswell, of course – would gather in a private room on the first floor on Friday evenings for a few hours of Georgian wit and conversation. I find myself visiting Gerrard Street a lot these days and when I do, I gaze up at the plaque on the wall of number 9. Things…

What are we actually being paid to do? That is the question we were tossing to and fro in the English office the other lunchtime. We began with the vexed question of the Tube drivers. London grinding to a halt did not affect us at all in Somerset. I – and the majority of my colleagues – are all for the right to strike, and many of us have done just that in the recent past. We couldn't help but wonder, though, whether the Tube drivers were justified in their demands. Everyone would like to earn more than they do, and everyone is prone to casting sideways looks at others’ earnings. But a qualified tube driver's starting salary is £71,000, while a newly qualified teacher's London salary (teachers in the…

Cancer is the cause of just over a quarter of deaths in England, and survival is longer where cancer is detected early. It might seem at first sight, therefore, that a single blood test to screen for several or many cancers at the same time would be a great advance. Trials are under way to find out whether or not the reality corresponds to what appears to stand to reason. But the whole question is fraught with difficulties, and I suspect that there won't soon – if ever – be a definitive answer. There will always be room for more research. Cancers vary greatly in their prevalence and natural history. Even the same cancer varies between individuals in the way it behaves. Prognosis is not yet an exact science, and…

Boycott's tough delivery SIR: The letter from John Gilbertson (September issue), which referred to Sir Geoffrey Boycott telling his friend to ‘bugger off’ when he asked him for an autograph, reminded me of my own more successful but transactional meeting with Sir Geoffrey. As a 14-year-old, I attended the Nottinghamshire v Yorkshire County Championship game at Worksop in the summer of 1972. At the end of the day's play, in which he'd scored a magnificent century – so was presumably in a good mood – I was hanging around outside the pavilion when the great man appeared and was about to make his way to his car. I sheepishly asked, ‘May I have your autograph, please, Mr Boycott?’ to which he replied, ‘Aye, lad, if you can carry my bag…

Soft: A Brief History of Sentimentality By Ferdinand Mount Bloomsbury Continuum £20 The first thing to say about Ferdinand Mount's Soft is that it's great fun. There was always the possibility that a book subtitled A Brief History of Sentimentality might entrap its reader in a quagmire of sticky treacliness. However, Mount breezes through a thousand years with wit and ingenuity. In this, his 30th book, he demonstrates intellectual agility worthy of an erudite mountain goat, taking massive leaps and bounds. He is utterly fearless in the connections he makes between great political turning points and corresponding developments in the manner in which we express our feelings on what he calls our bumpy road to love. Of course, we've long been accustomed to thinking of ‘sentimentality’ in a derogatory sense.…

When Everyone Knows That Everyone Knows … Common Knowledge and the Science of Harmony, Hypocrisy and Outrage By Stephen Pinker Allen Lane £25 Stephen Pinker, Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, has a knack for the catchy title. He has got better at this over the years. He started with Language Learnability and Language Development, which to be honest does not exactly grab one by the lapels. But he's got it down to a fine art now, with How the Mind Works, The Better Angels of Our Nature and Enlightenment Now being particularly good; and When Everyone Knows… might be the best of all. It is itself recursive, as is his whole project, which can be summed up as ‘thinking about thinking’. (This title has, alas, already been used,…

Potatoes are my happiness food. Nutritionally, the potato is all that anyone needs to keep body and soul together. At its simplest – baked in its jacket, soft and floury on the inside, blackened on the outside – it is best eaten from the hand, straight from the embers of a Guy Fawkes bonfire. It's even better when crisp-skinned from a high oven, split in half with a slab of cold butter straight from the fridge, a fingerful of roughly crushed peppercorns and a pinch of the flaky white sea salt that melts so elegantly on the tongue. But, for what Mrs Beeton used to call ‘made dishes’ – cooking that actually requires a cook – the French, bless their little wooden sabots, have done it to perfection. Consider the…

Every year, the challenge gets more extreme. In 2016, the comedian Eddie Izzard competed 27 marathons in 27 days. Last year, Russ Cook, the self-styled Hardest Geezer, ran the length of Africa, covering 10,900 miles in 352 days – roughly 28 miles every 24 hours. Now, even as you read this, a 31-year-old former world champion at computer games, Sam King, is in the middle of a challenge that is even more demanding. At the end of September, he set out from Battersea Park on Project 74, planning to run 74 ultramarathons on consecutive days. For most of the autumn, he will be pounding the streets, running a minimum of 50km (31 miles) every single day. He is doing it to memorialise his mum, who died earlier this year after…

One of the perennial questions about investing is how much the executives running the show really care about the interests of the shareholders whose money they are managing. Are their interests truly aligned with yours? Or are they just pretending, trying to get the share price high enough to make them rich in a few short years? Where a family has a controlling stake, the question should be easy to answer – your fortunes rise and fall with theirs. They can take a long view, so you should too, and both sides will live happily ever after. Unfortunately, life is seldom so simple. One generation may have built a brilliant business, but there is no super-manager gene to ensure the next can carry on the good work. Two examples demonstrate…

What are the key qualities to being the best player in the world? You have to be logical, quick-thinking – and be prepared to back your judgement – even when to do so involves some extremely courageous plays. Enter 28-year-old Michał Klukowski of Poland (who represents Switzerland through a sponsorship deal). Plan the play in five spades doubled after West leads a club, East winning the king and trying the ace, which you, Klukowski, ruff. Dealer North North-South Vulnerable (1) A weak hand with hearts and a minor – but really? The expression ‘making a mockery of the game’, perhaps in a Geordie accent, springs to mind. A mere mortal (MM) draws trumps and cashes the ace of diamonds, cursing when East discards. MM has to give up a diamond…

Edwardian days may have been the last time it was this fine to take a walk beside the waterways of the Norfolk Broads. These human-made lakes and connecting channels, cuts and rivers were then acclaimed for their gin-clear water and swaying miniature forests of aquatic plants. Those golden days were lost because of sediment-stirring from motorboats, sewage and, most of all, fertiliser and soil draining off the increasingly intensive farming close by. For as long as I've known them, Broadland waters have been brown. Not this summer and early autumn. So I took a walk beside the Bure, the prettiest of the Broadland rivers, to enjoy its newly sparkling waters. There are not many broads or rivers with good footpaths beside them, because most people enjoy them from floating craft.…

Growing up in industrial South Wales, where the men were men and the women by some margin worse, I hankered for somewhere more refined, more seemingly civilised and openly genteel. Would I find such a climate by cranking myself up several social classes and going to university, perhaps? My innocent assumption was that the humanities would be humane and the arts filled with nice people saying hello to clouds and flowers. I couldn't have been more wrong. Maybe people are better behaved in proper subjects such as medicine or quantum physics – subjects requiring rigour and application – but, in my (long) experience, those involved with English Literature, in particular, are on the whole disloyal, mendacious, grasping and thoroughly vile. The problem is that, unless one stays hidden away in…

Jilly Cooper Greyhounds in Need Greyhounds are heavenly dogs, but when their racing days are over, trainers just throw them out. My greyhound, Feather, was chucked out on the motorway with a muzzle on and was a tottering skeleton when I got him. Greyhounds are sofaholics and Feather would spin round the field in the morning, then take my hand in his mouth, lead me home and sleep all day. They're so loving and they give so much back. greyhoundsinneed.co.uk Amanda Barrie Operation Smile Most of us greet each other with a smile at Christmas. But one in 700 children worldwide are born with a cleft palate and many can't afford the simple surgery available. Please help to put smiles on their faces by supporting my favourite charity. Amanda Barrie,…

Whether by chance or design, this year's 80th anniversary D-Day celebrations coincided with the release of recordings of two musicians, Eric Coates and Myra Hess. In their differing ways, they take us back to those war years like few others. No one has conducted Eric Coates's music better than Eric Coates himself, nor has his recorded legacy been better preserved and documented than on Lyrita's recent 7-CD The Definitive Eric Coates (REAM 2145). The set, which provides a complete run of all the commercial recordings made by the uncrowned king of British light music between 1923 and 1957, can be had from Presto Music for around £25. An even more affordable 2-CD distillation The Best of the Definitive Eric Coates is also available (REAM 2146). Jessica Duchen's Myra Hess: National…

Woman helping to keep area clean Darlington and Stockton Times Uninvited woman makes cup of tea Sentinel Waitrose shoppers fuming as supermarket withdraws freebie loyalty offer Manchester Evening News £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 John Humphrys, Leslie Caron and Gyles Brandreth. Top of the Pods 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…

WHAT WAS whistling? The other day, I was listening to Otis Redding's ‘The Dock of the Bay’ when it hit me: no one whistles any more! The sound of someone whistling while they work or just walk down a street is one of those – like the rattle of a milk float – that have all but disappeared from British life. Sometimes I wonder if there really was a Britain of whistling postmen, factory workers and dustmen. Did dads whistle while washing the family car on a Sunday – or is this just my nostalgia for a time that never was? Cultural historians will tell you that, yes, we were once a whistling nation. In A Brief History of Whistling, authors Allan Chatburn and John Lucas evoke a Britain where…

We've all been there. You're reading your book when a fellow passenger plays music on their phone at full blast. Many of us will sympathise with Radio 3 presenter Petroc Trelawney. He complained about the phenomenon but admitted he was ‘quite a coward’. So, rather than remonstrate, he chose to ‘seethe internally’. Trelawny's confession coincided with an American study of 4,500 participants. It revealed that both men and women find a willingness to intervene more attractive than mere physical strength. A potential partner who stepped in to save a hypothetical victim from a threat or altercation was thought more desirable than one who hung back, however handsome. Unsurprising perhaps. Yet it is revealing. While people do their Ironman runs, build bulging biceps and post pictures of corrugated torsos, what really…

I'm now 87 – and I've lived too long. What is it really like for someone who has felt more or less fit, active and in control of their life ever since student days, to find themselves really old at last? Well, in short: it is horrible. How I envy all those people just a bit younger than I am – or the ones who've had a bit more luck in not getting some nasty illness that wouldn't have mattered a couple of years before, but now seems to have had a lethally degrading effect. And how I envy in particular those people, whose obits I frequently read, who have had the good fortune to die ‘just a bit too young’ or ‘suddenly’. Often an obit will recount that So-and-So…

The term ‘bluestocking’, referring to a scholarly woman, has a colourful, intriguing history. The meaning has evolved over time, reflecting the capricious social attitudes towards women with a passion for learning. Occasionally, it is still used as an insult, deriding women deemed to hold an unhealthy appetite for knowledge. But the term has been reclaimed for others, including second-wave feminists and, more recently, a group of literary ladies at my college, Christ Church, University of Oxford. We are reviving bluestocking practices, including hosting intellectual salons and publishing new writing. The history of the word bluestocking now makes it a joyously facetious – even punk – epithet. The original bluestockings of the mid-18th century were an eclectic group of accomplished women and men. Among them were writers, actors, artists, historians and…

Julie Burchill added a charming message to her invitation to me to ‘The Launch of the Modern Review on Friday 13th September 1991, at the Soho Rooms, the Groucho Club, 45 Dean Street, W1’. Written in Julie's neat hand at the bottom, it read, ‘We have a special treat for YOU!’ I still have no idea what it was. Nor does she. But she says she's sure that it was something ‘HIGHLY WHOLESOME’. I do remember a lot else about the conception and short life of the 1990s’ most influential little culture magazine, which closed 30 years ago, in 1995. Dreamt up by Burchill and her passionately platonic friend Toby Young (now Lord Young of Acton, a Badenoch peerage, who's become a serious right-wing propagandist), it was inspired by a…

Some of the most exhilarating experiences of my recent country life have taken place to a background of dramatically purging music. The shed on the edge of my field allows sufficient distance from neighbours to grant me the privilege of listening to deafening music without ‘disturbing’ any of them. So emotionally rousing have I found the sophisticated symphonies of Havergal Brian (1876-1972) that I have taken some criticism of him rather personally. Writing in the Critic magazine, Norman Lebrecht declares Brian a ‘sticky case… Some composers are rightly obscure. There is a place for marginal composers – it's on the margins,’ he sneers. Yet Brian fans are campaigning for 2026, his sesquicentenary, to be the year when the Proms season 2026 should forget about ‘grooving’ and instead promote England's first…

As Carmelite nuns, whether we live in town or country, we are very conscious of being counter-cultural. Some aspects of modern technology are a huge help and are in constant use; others are not. I can't think of any Carmelite nun who is inseparable from her smartphone. They have other things to do. Recently, I spent the night in a Carmelite monastery in west London. Its architecture is counter-cultural in the best possible way. The Victorian building has, from the outside, a forbidding quality. It is made of weathered and darkened yellowish brick, its extensive walls are windowless and it clearly means business. Its austerity came as a great relief after the appallingly bling architecture that has overtaken London in the last decades, obliterating the city I used to know…

As I didn't know more than three people in Los Angeles, it was John Edwards, the LA showbiz correspondent for the Daily Express who set up the encounter in 1985. I had just been contracted by Paramount Pictures to join the writing team for a new comedy series, and that meant moving from my quiet existence in north London to the razzle-dazzle of Beverly Hills. John was determined to introduce me to some people he thought would smooth my way into the social whirl of the town. He started by having me invited to dinner with Jeff Bridges. Then John told me how much he would like me to meet film director Russell Mulcahy, who was about to shoot an MTV video for Tina Turner's new single, ‘We Don't Need…

The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief By Richard Holmes William Collins £25 The premise of Richard Holmes's new book is that there are two versions of Tennyson (1809-92) and one of them is far more interesting than the other. The later one is Queen Victoria's beloved, bearded bard, the patriotic patriarch, who in later life liked nothing better than to read aloud the entirety of his long poem Maud to a large audience, only occasionally breaking off to murmur to himself, ‘Yes, that is good!’ Then there's the earlier version, the younger one, to whom I would refer as Real Tennyson. Before he grew the beard, the poet cut a dash. True, he was a bit of an odd fish, reeking of tobacco, awkward socially,…

It's good to know who hates you and it is good to be hated by the right people. Johnny Cash I do not want money. I do not want wealth. All I ask is that people humbly and honestly sink to their knees and worship me. Tim Brooke-Taylor I did not regret it at the time and I don't regret it now. I have never felt a moment's regret. Reggie Kray on a life of crime My idea is that there is music in the air; music all around us. The world is full of it, and you simply take as much as you require. Edward Elgar My father said, ‘You must never try to make all the money that's in a deal. Let the other fellow make some money…

Garrick Theatre, London, until 21st February Mel Brooks (99 not out) has spent over 75 years in show business, and he'll be best remembered for two hilarious movies he made in his forties – his scandalous spoof Western, Blazing Saddles (1974), and his wicked showbiz satire, The Producers (1967). The Producers barely broke even at the box office, but during subsequent decades its reputation grew and grew. Finally, in 2001, Brooks did what now seems blindingly obvious – he transformed this cult film about a Broadway musical into a Broadway musical in its own right. Unlike the feature film, the musical was an instant hit – first on Broadway, then in London's West End. In 2005, it even spawned a (sorely underrated) second movie, starring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick,…

I've been meaning to write about Gerard Hoffnung (1925-59) – master cartoonist, humorist, humanitarian, and musical jester par excellence – for longer than I care to remember. The 50th anniversary of the 1956 Royal Festival Hall Hoffnung Music Festival came and passed. And I would have missed this year's Hoffnung centenary had it not been for a couple of timely prompts. The first came from an old friend of this column, Dr Andrew Mayes, multitasking music-lover and chronicler of the work of pioneering recorder player – and Hoffnung confederate – Carl Dolmetsch. Browsing in his favourite second-hand bookshop in Cromer while holidaying on the Norfolk coast, he came across Hoffnung, Annetta Hoffnung's beautifully written and lavishly illustrated 1988 biography. The second prompt came from an edition of that wisest and…

Agatha Christie was born in Torquay and chose the River Dart as her hidey hole from the press and her fans. What better choice? Her Georgian home, Greenway, set high above the river, open to the public, is reassuringly spooky. There's something macabre about musty eiderdowns; little wonder the duvet took over. We were happy to board the ferry and return to beautiful Dartmouth, which the posh set have leap-frogged in favour of Salcombe. More fool them. Dartmouth has far more charm and greater pedigree. With its deep port and easily defended river mouth, it was perfect for larger sailing ships and became the embarkation point for the Crusades of the 12th century, later establishing itself as a naval base. Both Raleigh and Drake launched raids from its harbour. And…

Depreciation is the silent killer in car ownership. We know about it but don't have to face it until we sell. So we ignore it. We're more aware of the smaller costs of ownership – fuel, tax, insurance and maintenance – because we're forever paying for them. The AA recently surveyed depreciation rates of popular models. Unusually, their baseline was not what a car costs when new; instead they compared its estimated values at one, three and five years old. Maybe the reason for this is that many more of us buy used cars than buy new; also, most nearly-new cars, like brand-new ones, are bought through leasing schemes. These schemes – without which the car market would collapse – further protect us from awareness of the day of reckoning,…

Robert Fox has led a previous Oldie tour to this enigmatic area ruled by the mysterious Cathars, and proved himself to be the most inspirational of guides. We will be staying at the very comfortable Domaine d'Auriac, set in its own park. It is just ten minutes from Carcassonne, home of Europe's most complete and elegant walled medieval city. High points include the mountain fortress of Montségur, where the Cathars made their last stand against the forces of crusaders. We will see the great abbeys Fontfroide and Alet-les-Bains, and walk through the remains of Roman Narbonne. We will sample the fine wines and generous cuisine of Roussillon and French Catalonia. Finally, we will have a lovely day by the sea at Gruissan. ITINERARY Tuesday 30th June - Departure We take…

IN COMPETITION No 324 you were invited to write a poem called Flint. I was astonished by the close love many of you bore for the stone. Julie Wigley wrote of the 19th-century forger of stone-age tools Edward Simpson, known as Flint Jack. Pat Gannon-Leary wrote of Flint McCullough, legend of the West, in Wagon Train on television. Martin Elster celebrated Flint, Michigan, ‘a town trying hard to come back from the dead’. Clare Morris watched David sling his flint pebble. Heather Uebel wrote of a flint axe, a picture of which she kindly sent, and Margaret Jones sent another. Tom Norbury recommended the matchlock over the flintlock. Commiserations to them and to Christopher Paul, Erika Fairhead, David Shelton, Roger Farrance, Con Connell, Peter Wood-Tovey, Diana Cutler, Frank McDonald and…

Go on. Treat yourself to a touch of luxury before the Christmas shoppers swarm. In November, you can still linger and choose your presents with care. Browse those lush high-end retailers at leisure – and choose a watch, designer handbag or coat that someone you love has been coveting. Or stroll into one of the innovative jewellers that nowspecialise in colourful, versatile bracelets and earrings for younger pepole. Or spend time tasting claret to get a truly decent bottle for someone you eant to thank. Or choose the goodies for that hamper in person, rather than just leaving the selection to the shop. You might even indulge in a new cashmere jumper for yourself, or in that interesting bottle of Japanese whisky you've wondered about trying. Then go and pick…

At one point, C S Lewis wasn't a fan of church or God. He said, ‘Though I liked clergyman as I liked bears, I had little wish to be in a zoo.’ Even after his conversion, he was something of a reluctant churchgoer but came to see the traditional straightforward service at his local church as a centre point of his life, it gave him hope and got him out of himself. It's something we seem to be rediscovering today – particularly at Christmas. The Rev Alison Joyce is Rector of St Bride's, Fleet Street, the journalists’ church – and a Wren church, too. She has noticed the trend: ‘We've had more confirmations in the last 12 months than in any year since I've been here.’ Most of those are…

I've got it wrong before, I admit. I once had to present Harold Pinter with a bottle from 25 of his ‘best friends’, at a dinner to celebrate his 75th birthday in the cellars of Berry Bros in St James's Street. My task was to find something from his birth year, 1930, a vintage Michael Broadbent described as ‘execrable’. As any wine from that year was undrinkable, I turned to spirits. Single ‘vintage’, 75-year-old whisky or Cognac was ruinously expensive 20 years ago (now it's prohibitive). So, I found some delicious 1930 Armagnac from Nismes-Delclou and presented it to Pinter after dinner. He took it from me and paused (of course). ‘I don't drink Armagnac,’ he snarled, putting the bottle back in its carrier bag. I wilted. His friends wilted,…