The Oldie

Editor Harry Mount Sub-editor Penny Phillips Art editor Michael Hardaker Supplements editor Charlotte Metcalf Editorial assistant Amelia Milne Publisher James Pembroke Patron saints Jeremy Lewis, Barry Cryer At large Richard Beatty Our Old Master Dav

Candida Crewe (p17) has written six novels and one non-fiction book. For nearly 50 years, she’s written articles and columns for the Times, Guardian, Telegraph, Spectator and many more. John Sergeant (p24) was the BBC’s Chief Political Correspondent,

Joan Morecambe, who died on 26th March, on her 97th birthday, was a perfect exponent of that crucial yet underrated role, the showbiz wife. From the 1950s, when Morecambe and Wise were just jobbing comics, to the 1980s, when they’d become Britain’s b

Grandmother lifted into air as jacket caught on shutters Daily Telegraph ‘True gentleman’ TV presenter Andi Peters spotted in Conwy North Wales Chronicle Café to reopen today amid bollard works The Press (York) £15 for published contributions SIGN UP

I know I have come a bit late to the party – I have only just begun to discover the joys of mindfulness. To be honest, I wasn’t quite sure what the word meant until my physiotherapist, Finola, 34, explained it to me. Mindfulness means living in the p

Long mislaid in my chaotic west-London house – which exists, as we will see, in a microclimate of its own – is a gift from the late Michael Winner. He and I were enemies for years, and then friends. It was once a fact of journalistic life that persis

Bruce Montgomery? Bruce Montgomery (1921-78) was a composer and author. If you’ve watched films of the 1950s and 1960s, including the early Carry Ons and the series started by Doctor in the House, you will have heard his music, and aficionados of cla

a Swedish death clean? Döstädning, literally death clean in Swedish, means reducing your possessions to save your loved ones a huge task when you’re gone. Decluttering, then? Yeh, but no, but… A lovely lady called Margareta Magnusson makes it more of

Darlings [Laura’s six siblings], My life seems to go on very much the same. I broke my record by having a tummy upset the day before D-Day. D-Day sent my temperature up. [They] plugged M&B [antibiotic] down me, which made me feel like a damp piece of

Gilbert Keith Chesterton – born 150 years ago, on 29th May 1874 – never quite goes away. He’s still widely read and quoted by people who rely on speechwriters rather than books. He’s a major voice in conservative circles, in particular. The Father Br

When we conjure up visions of the great Black Sea port of Odessa today, we aren’t likely to see the elegant French-style boulevards, the grand, honey-coloured buildings and the proud Russian Orthodox churches. We see dead bodies, twisted metal, piles

Did you know that queen bees can suddenly start laying eggs that make drones instead of worker bees? So instead of a colony of industrious females busily making honey to feed the hive, you have nothing but useless drones. All the bees starve to death

Twenty-five years ago, I accompanied a colleague to a shop in Bond Street, where a dress was being held for her to try on. She wanted me to give my ‘honest opinion’. The dress was presented. It was a thing of beauty which fitted perfectly. The woman

I thought about voting in the local elections, but in the end I decided against it. I belonged to that very large number of people – millions – who never wanted the embarrassment and expense of a London mayor in the first place. We are comparable to

Every week brings another story of the decline of merrymaking and culture in Britain. According to the beautifully named Night-Time Industries Association, over 2,679 clubs and bars closed between March 2020 and December 2023. More than a thousand of

Mary holds that there’s no point in my trying to find greener grass by relocating to a corrugated former Wesleyan chapel perched on a Shropshire hill. Forget the tragedy that Shropshire has become fashionable. No, Mary believes I am a ‘dyed-in-the-wo

Mother fell. She ended up sitting, back against the wall, like a weary-looking soft toy on a slow edition of The Repair Shop. I called the emergency services. While I was on to them, I told them my underactive thyroid medication had recently delivere

I’m too much of a Catholic convent girl to be persuaded by the arguments favouring euthanasia – now called ‘assisted dying’. But if I were to be tempted by the campaign advanced so successfully by Esther Rantzen, the point that might lure me is money

An early morning scene: Father (from the bottom of the stairs): ‘Come on, Tommy – time you were up and off to school.’ Tommy (from upstairs): ‘I’m not going to school today.’ Father: ‘Why not?’ Tommy: ‘Because the teachers ignore me, the children bul

Paul Flather, Fellow of Mansfield College, Oxford, laid on a fine memorial service for his mother, Shreela Flather, the first Asian woman to become a member of the House of Lords, at Easthampstead Park, near Bracknell, Berkshire. Among the distinguis

Sometimes – for example, when I try to find out the prevalence of Dupuytren’s contracture – I wonder whether Pontius Pilate wasn’t on to something when he asked what truth was. A search into Dupuytren’s contracture – a thickening of tissues in the pa

SIR: The Old Un asked readers to send suggestions as to about why terrorist Rose Dugdale rebelled (March blog). I can perhaps own up to what changed her. It could have been the night in 1963 when I was ordered to sleep with her. I met her at a party

I was born in Edinburgh in 1955, joining an older brother and sister, my mum and my dad in a typical upstairs-downstairs tenement block. Dad, a bobby on the beat (and a mason), discovered there was a need for police in New Zealand, with promise of yo

In 1948, Dr Goodenough published a book about a fictional family, the Neverwells. Their many complaints were diagnosed and treated by the wise, all-knowing doctor. The Neverwells were the forerunners of today’s health columns. The list of illnesses,

April 1979 was wet. The week leading up to Easter was especially dismal. I had been in Berry Brothers, the wine shop, for just over a year, building up a group of regular customers: people living in London with a love of wine, who would drop on a wee

All That Glitters By Orlando Whitfield Profile £20 About halfway through this telling of the story of Inigo Philbrick, the young art dealer imprisoned for seven years for fraud in 2022, I was reminded of a childhood memory. It was of the millionaire

Away Weekend By Lesley Fernández-Armesto Quadrant Books £10 There are not enough female participants in the genre of comic fiction. Entering the ring for the first time, aged 67, comes Lesley Fernández-Armesto, who has delivered a perfect comedy of E

Reading Lessons By Carol Atherton Fig Tree £18.99 Carol Atherton is an English teacher working in a boys’ grammar school, which accepts girls in the sixth form. She has written a thoughtful book about the texts chosen to be read in schools and the re

Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life By Jason Roberts riverrun £25 The year is 1707. Separated by some 700 miles (as the Corvus comix flies), two naturalists are born, destined for world fame. Social climbing (sorry, mobilit

James By Percival Everett Mantle £20 The title of Percival Everett’s typically inventive and thoughtful new novel alerts the reader to its bold intentions. James, the narrator and principal character in James, has been known since the 1880s as Jim. H

About 200 years ago, central London began a transformation without equal in its history. Over two decades or so, many of the buildings, vistas and streetscapes were built that still define the city, from Regent’s Park to the National Gallery, having

Showbusiness is like sex. When it’s wonderful, it’s wonderful. But when it isn’t very good, it’s still all right. Max Wall Women, even more than the working class, is the great unknown quantity of the race. Keir Hardie Will she kiss him under the nos

We were invited to a kitchen supper the other night. It’s an outdated phrase – where else do you entertain these days? The occupants of every single household near us in London have smashed down walls to create an open-plan eat-in kitchen with a vast

At one point in this biopic about Amy Winehouse, she’s sitting, dejected, in Soho Square when she spots a lone fox. Uh-oh! Ever since that stag kept popping up in The Queen (2006), we know that hunted animals stand in for hunted humans on the big scr

Our tennis club asks members to refrain from foul language on court – ‘even if, as is almost always the case, it is directed at yourself’. I appreciate that amused, schoolmasterly rebuke. No such humorous attitude was ever detected in the foul-mouthe

One of the keenest viewers of the six-part Emmy-winning The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, when it aired in February 2015, was the star himself, Bob ‘killed them all’ Durst. The docuseries, written and directed by Andrew Jarecki, investig

Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me) was back on the radio a few weeks ago. I fell through a wormhole in time and found myself in 1975 when it was part of the glorious soundtrack of college life. We dialled it up non-stop on our pub jukebox, assuming i

Some gardeners, against Dame Nature’s better judgement, prefer a clean swathe of tilled earth between their plants. ‘There’s tidy,’ they say around here. The Dame was occupying the ground long before we humans set foot on it; better, then, to do it h

The Tradescants, father and son, travelled widely in central America in the 17th century. They brought back, among many other plants, a scarlet-flowering climber which was initially grown for decoration. Then someone discovered that the long pods gro

This spring, try Regional Cooking of England (edited by Carol Wilson). It’s a hefty, encyclopedia-sized 650-pager, with 280 updated recipes set out on double-page spreads with numbered steps and elegant, updated photographs. All the old favourites ar

Reggie St Cloud, Brenda Last’s brother in Evelyn Waugh’s A Handful of Dust, ranks highest in my gastronomic pantheon. To describe him as omnivorous would damn him with faint praise. ‘He ate in a ruthless manner, champing his food (it was his habit, o

My Scottish friend Paul, with whom I regularly watch rugby and partake of more single-malt Scotch than perhaps is wise, doesn't exactly defy the perfidious Sassenachs’ stereotyping of his countryfolk. He has a keen eye for a bargain. He recently aler

Back in the 1980s, an American academic called Bob Goldman conducted research among some of the best young college athletes in the States. He asked them a simple question: if there was a drug available that would guarantee you an Olympic gold medal,

Renault’s adopted Romanian orphan, Dacia (pronounced datcha), are rightly renowned for their range of cheap, reliable, no-frills vehicles. They do exactly what they say on the tin. Now, courtesy of Dacia, within months we’ll be able to buy something

Do you believe in net zero? Woe betide you if you don’t, because it has taken on the mantle of a national religion to rank alongside the NHS. The government has passed a law to say we must hit it by 2035. Labour has responded with an even more evange

This is a bumper year for elections. The electoral stars have aligned so that there will be well over 60 national elections in 2024. About half the world’s population will be able to have some sort of say in who governs them this year. That’s a lot o

In Murnau, a quaint market town 40 miles south of Munich, there is a pretty little house that changed the course of modern art. From 1909 to 1914, the Münter-Haus – now a fascinating museum – was the lively rendezvous of a group of Expressionist arti

Here are some delights for you! Charles Lamb (not the great essayist) was a somewhat sad and lonely child, born in 1816. His particular passion was a fascination with chivalry and tournaments. And he built an exquisite castle for hundreds of pet guin

Is there something you really miss? Not knowing where the light switch is in the middle of the night. And I miss the dog terribly. He’s very grumpy. He’s a cockapoo. If he were a person, he would be the Major in Fawlty Towers. Do you travel light? Ha

One of the joys of top-level bridge is visiting new places. I loved last year’s European Open Championships in Strasbourg. I’d be lying if I said that my team performed brilliantly, although we had our moments … such as this one featuring Simon Cope

IN COMPETITION No 305 you were invited to write a poem called Dawn Chorus. I liked Charles Owen’s description of the cock or rooster as ‘Hot hacksaw-headed, braggart-breasted,/ Liveried in flame’. Wally Smith was right to call ‘A jay’s call like a bl

Q I’ve been happily married for years, with a son of 14. The problem is that I remember my wife became friendly with another man about the time my son was conceived and I’m becoming convinced it’s his child. Can I ask my wife for a DNA test? It might