The Oldie

Decision on 200 homes plan in Harrogate is delayed Northern Echo Shopping trolley dumped in park Bolton News Bench fear for OAPs Millport Weekly News £15 for published contributions The September issue is on sale on 26th August 2023. Go to App Store

✽ ‘Given sufficient notice, one can always be spontaneous.’ If this saying reminds you of Oscar Wilde, it’s entirely appropriate. With this aphorism, Robert Eddison has won the fourth Wilde Wit Competition run by the Oscar Wilde Society, in partnersh

Editor Harry Mount Sub-editor Penny Phillips Art editor Jonathan Anstee Supplements editor Jane Mays Editorial assistant Amelia Milne Publisher James Pembroke Patron saints Jeremy Lewis, Barry Cryer At large Richard Beatty Our Old Master David Kowitz

‘Never commit murder,’ said Oscar Wilde. ‘A gentleman should never do anything he cannot talk about at dinner.’ To date, there has been no blood on my hands, but that may change. I am busy devising the perfect murder. I haven’t had so much fun in yea

Admirers of the highest classical culture will fondly recall Clash of the Titans, the 1981 filmic meisterwork in which Laurence Olivier’s Zeus and his fellow Olympians look imperiously down on humanity, and use their limitless powers to manipulate th

The boardman was the lowest-paid, most important member of staff in the betting shops that appeared legally on the nation’s high streets from Monday 1st May 1961, then known as licensed betting offices. He – almost always ‘he’ – was the only member o

Charlotte Metcalf (p18) is an awardwinning film-maker and freelance writer. She is the editor of Great British Brands and co-presents the Break Out Culture podcast. Griff Rhys Jones (p29) starred in Not the Nine O’Clock News and Alas Smith and Jones

White people food is a piece of white bread with a sorry slice of ham and a sad tomato. It’s a hard-boiled egg and a side of undressed salad. It’s hummus and carrots. It’s a cheese sandwich. It’s a ‘lunch of suffering’. And it’s a source of fascinati

I can’t drive. Not ‘I don’t drive’, ‘I haven’t got a car’ or ‘I would rather not drive’. I really can’t drive. Now that I’m looking back it doesn’t seem such a big deal, but in the ’70s driving was the Holy Grail for young people and not driving was

Botox, fillers and surgery have made cosmetic perfection attainable and banal. And celebrities are constantly baring their souls or revealing their ‘truth’, rendering their over-shared life stories banal – and distinctly unglamorous. How times have c

Not long before her departure from the political scene, I was invited to a Christmas lunch at Lord McAlpine’s country house, where Mrs Thatcher and Denis were the main guests. We were 12 in all: an odd mix, including Terence Donovan, Mrs T’s favourit

The night of 7th July 1943 was heavy with an approaching storm. My sister and I were in our beds. Our mother came to kiss us goodnight before going out to dinner. I asked her if she was going to Government House. The incumbents were the Duke of Winds

Snodhill Castle is England’s newest Norman ruin. More than 900 years old, it is only just starting to surrender some of its misty secrets, including a rediscovered royal chapel. Most castles were well documented, having for centuries required militar

Stranded by bad weather the other day in Portland, Oregon, I took a walk. The town still prides itself on its 1880s converted sawmills-and-saloons ambience. But, surveying central Portland from a nearby hilltop, I was struck more by the similarity to

H arriet Crawley’s mantra has always been ‘Life is not a sprint, but a marathon.’ This is just as well, considering the head-spinning number of careers, relationships, tragedies and triumphs she has packed into her 74 years. We have been friends for

I am a ‘has-been’, a ‘former this’, an ‘ex-that’ and a ‘past everything’. Although my children never believed I was anything other than an embarrassment, there was a time when I was quite a big fish in a small pond, with some influence in larger lake

There is something lovely about sleeping cars. Maybe because it’s the only way grown-ups get rocked to sleep. As a child, I would ride the Blue Train from Johannesburg to Cape Town and fight with my brothers for the top bunk. The excitement of travel

When we oldies were young, the BBC abounded in interesting discussionprogrammes in which party politics was never mentioned. There was, instead, the sense that the radio – later the telly – were like intelligent dinner tables or tutorials. There was

What makes a good historian? A new book, Journeys of the Mind, by one of the best of the past 50 years, Peter Brown, promises some answers. Brown is the pioneer of a whole way of looking at a historical period, ‘late antiquity’, between the fall of R

Midsummer this year brought much conversation about the outcome of Brexit, seven years on. Michael Heseltine predicted that when our generation pops off, the younger people will revise and correct the Brexit question. Perhaps. But there is also a the

The eighties and nineties were glorious decades for fashion editors. Glossy magazines had big budgets to enable the expression of aesthetic vision. Humans still had the capacity for abstract thought. Never mind if the clothes were neither practical n

• The smokers of the world buy about 18 billion cigarettes a day. • One-third of the world’s cigarettes are smoked by the Chinese. • 480,000 Americans die each year from smokingrelated illnesses. • Smoking kills more Americans than alcohol, car accid

School trips are back on again. A member of staffsays that when, in old age, we look back on our schooldays, we will remember nothing at all about the teachers or the lessons – but only the friends and the trips. I’m not sure I agree. There are teach

The way in which the Gospels give us only the bare minimum of detail can on occasion be frustrating. It would be nice to know the exact conditions under which Jesus visited the house of Martha and Mary, as told in Luke 10:38-42. It has been conjectur

Charles Moore, Hilary Alexander’s editor at the Daily Telegraph, read the first lesson at her thanksgiving service at St Bride’s, Fleet Street. She was fashion editor at the Telegraph for 23 years. Julia Robson, Hilary’s deputy for many years, led th

SIR: I have just celebrated my 80th birthday and been much acclaimed by my family and friends. Even the government has got in on the act, as it has increased my state pension by 25p a week. Unfortunately, my village shop has hardly anything to offer

One ordinary lunchtime in 1957 at my prep school in Dorset, when I was 12, I saw my father walk into the dining room. I’d had no forewarning he was coming, and I panicked that he was bearing some terrible news. Was my mother or perhaps my sister dead

Metropolitain: An Ode to the Paris Metro By Andrew Martin Corsair £16.99 We must start with the smell, obviously. Everyone has mentioned the smell of the Paris Metro, yet it remains indefinable. Its ‘cloying but not unpleasant sweetness’ reminds Andr

Last Post By Frederic Raphael Carcanet £30 Since 2001, Frederic Raphael – author of The Glittering Prizes, screenplay writer of Far from the Madding Crowd and Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut – has been writing memoirs under the umbrella title Personal Terms

Back in the ’60s, I had my 21st-birthday party in what has become the most expensive house in London. It’s on the market for £250 million. The Holme is a white architectural wonder, with a pillared portico, a rotunda and pediments aplenty. Built by D

Surreal Spaces: The Life and Art of Leonora Carrington By Joanna Moorhead Thames & Hudson £30 Joanna Moorhead wrote the well-received biography of the Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington (1917-2011). Now she has produced a lavishly illustrated book

So little, England. Little music. Little art. Timid, tasteful, nice. But one loves it. Loves it. You see I can say I love London. I can say I love England. I can’t say I love my country. I don’t know what that means. The Guy Burgess character in Alan

How many times recently have you had to do battle with opening packages? I am fed up with having to line up a variety of tools to do this, including a nail? le, a Stanley knife and mini shears. A cardboard container arrived recently. I pulled the end

The Three Graces By Amanda Craig Abacus £18.99 Critics have been confused by the novelist Amanda Craig (this is her ninth novel) because she tackles big, troubling subjects but within highly readable narratives. I consumed this one – multilayered, fu

Had enough of films about Marvel comics, misery and death, punctuated with sex and swearing? Can’t face Indiana Jones going through the motions in his eighties or Mission Impossible, Part 93? Well, here is the charming film for you. Hello, Bookstore

To care about how people talk is to align yourself with some pretty blimpish bedfellows, including the horrible Professor Higgins. ‘It’s “Ow!” and “Garn”, that keep her in her place – not her ragged clothes or dirty face.’ When Keir Starmer took up t

My earliest television memory is from the summer of 1973. I crept downstairs in what seemed like the middle of the night but must have been around the 9pm watershed, to find my mother transfixed by a small man with enormously bushy eyebrows. Wearing

Isn’t it strange that it’s taken a hospitalisation and her Celebration world tour postponed for people to admit that Miss Madonna Ciccone is one of the most important artists of the modern age? She collapsed with a bacterial infection the day she’d b

Holburne Museum, Bath, to 7th Janaury In 1950, the potter Lucie Rie (1902-95) declared, ‘If one should ask me whether I believe myself to be a modern potter or a potter of tradition, I would answer I don’t know and I don’t care. Art theories have no

If you already have a 2024 diary, I urge you to enter ‘Ferryside Garden Crawl’ on Sunday 23rd June. Then begin to make plans to visit Carmarthenshire for a happy summer’s day. A score of seaside gardens within a mile of one another will open to the p

Currants are the name we give to those little, smooth-skinned fruit, usually black or red, differentiating them – not always logically – from the fruit we call berries. In Germany, they are all Beeren: Erdbeeren (strawberries) and Johannisbeeren (bla

The soft-fruit season’s in full swing. As Simon Courtauld says, above, look out for blackcurrants, strawberries, raspberries, redcurrants, blueberries… This leads to thoughts of home-made jam. If, like me, you’re a one-person household, it needn’t be

Have you sat next to a tapper at dinner recently? You’ll know if you have because you’ll have bruising between your shoulder and elbow, on the arm nearest to them. Tappers like to ensure that they have your full attention by tapping (and, even, slapp

We might appear knobbly and weatherbeaten – gnarled and wizened, even – and we may not be as prolific or productive as once we were. But, in our maturity, we can still teach uppity young whippersnappers a thing or two. Old age has its compensations.

Way back in 1989, Channel 4 premiered a drama series called The Manageress. Starring Cherie Lunghi and Warren Clarke, and written by the magnificent Stan Hey, it was based on what was then considered a ludicrous idea: a woman taking charge of a profe

It was one of those I-bet-I-can/I-betyou-can’t sessions. I contended that, even in inflationary times, you can buy a clean used car for under £1,000 with a reasonable chance that it will last a year without major expense – maybe much longer. Even if

This spring, to our delight, a pair of robins built their nest in our porch. Five eggs were laid, three hatched and the parents diligently sped back and forth every 20 minutes or so, feeding them, although they seemed to pause at night. Then one day

That cheap flight is no longer a bargain – once you’ve paid extra so you can sit together, carry on a bag too large to fit under the seat and avoid the scramble with priority boarding. The price of an Airbnb balloons with the owner’s charges for clea

Here I am in a cool cellar in Tbilisi, wine to the left of me, wine to the right of me. As each glass is reverently polished off– this is no time for spitting – it is almost possible to imagine that this very act of drinking wine is a critical part o

Anything you can’t leave home without? I’m a very keen tourist, and I used to take John Michell’s Sacred England and the National Trust Handbook. Is there something you really miss? Quite a lot of musicians take their own pillow. Noel Gallagher takes

1 Dries up and dies (7) 5 Distance record broken by Roger Bannister (4) 7 Connections (5) 8 Having an end or limit (6) 10 Deceptive trick (4) 11 In a dignified way, serenely (8) 13 Put up with (6) 14 Rich (sl) (6) 17 Abandon building (8) 19 Fine cosm

IN COMPETITION No 295 you were invited to write a poem called Roots. Cherry MacGregor started off in medias res: ‘Has the vine died? My husband had asked,/ As we enjoyed lunch in the garden.’ Another excellent opening came from DM Davis: ‘Roots, oh m

There is something very appealing about a sure-thing problem – where the correct line of play guarantees success. And it’s even more satisfying when a counterintuitive play is required. Take this Four Spades from Rubber Bridge. Assuming spades split

Q Now nearly 60, I have suffered from premature ejaculation for most of my life. But I’ve just met a wonderful woman and have fallen in love for the first time in my life. Everything is fine – except in the bedroom. I’ve read books about it, but noth