Dreading another summer of ‘76
Joanna is a national treasure
ONE of the great privileges of the career my wife and I enjoy is getting to know some of our national treasures. The absolutely fabulous Joanna Lumley is one of them. A few years ago we had dinner with her and mutual friends and she did not disappoint – funny, wise, all-round terrific company. Afterwards Judy told me she thought Joanna had “lovely hair” and I reflected that as an actress at the top of her game she must have an army of professional crimpers to take care of it.
Not at all. This week Joanna casually revealed that she has always cut and dyed her hair herself, using over-thecounter products. She cheerfully admitted being “too mean” to pay for a professional stylist. And there’s more: that famously creamy complexion? All down to a £4 pot of Astral moisturiser. Used it for 40 years, she says. Oh, and no chauffeur-driven limo, thanks very much. She goes by tube.
See? National treasure. WHISPER it soft but we may be heading for a heatwave summer. It’s not just going to be warmer than average for mid-May next week. The long-term outlook is for the spring drought to morph into a long, parched summer. Stand by with the stand-pipes.
If it comes to pass, I hope I enjoy it rather more than the last record-breaking summer scorcher of 1976. I was pregnant with twins and as the sunbaked days rolled relentlessly on, I gradually became more and more uneasy. I wasn’t the only one. It wasn’t just hot and dry, it was completely cloudless, week in, week out. North Norfolk, where I lived, turned into a vast dust-bowl. It felt like living in a desert.
Some meteorologists and other scientists got rattled, too. They began speculating wildly as to the causes of the heatwave. Had the Earth shifted on its axis? Had its path around the sun altered in some way? Was this thing going to be permanent?
You can imagine the effect of all this on a heavily pregnant woman like me. I began to wonder what sort of world I was bringing my babies into. Were we all doomed?
Of course, the rains returned in a spectacular deluge (with delicious irony, the very day after the government appointed a Minister for Drought) and Britain no longer basked but wallowed, soggily. My twins were born during a very wet spring and would grow up in reliably rainy Manchester.
If we are indeed about to revisit the long hot summer of 1976, this time I shall have Corporal Jones’s mantra at the ready: “Don’t panic!”
GeRmans aRe not that efficient
I WROTE here recently of my irritation with news broadcasters who refuse to refer to unexploded Second World War bombs as German or Nazi, but soppily and neutrally as “a wartime bomb”. No such politically correct convention when it’s the other way round, is there?
This week Stuttgart went into lockdown after allied bombs were discovered. News programmes here had no problem describing them as dropped by either the British or Americans. This kind of one-way political correctness drives me nuts. News is news. Tell it like it is.
Mind you, the fact that a big modern city was all but paralysed while the bombs were defused tells you a lot about why we won the war. Germany never developed four-engined bombers such as the Lancaster or Flying Fortress. They struggled on with relatively puny single and twin-engined jobs, which never packed the punch the allies could deliver.
I also read this week that far from running a superefficient war machine, the Nazis were actually fairly rubbish at it. Their muchfeared Tiger tanks were always breaking down, apparently, aircraft were always conking out and a huge number of V1s and V2s blew up on launch or veered wildly off-course.
Not so much the masterrace, then. More like British Leyland on a Friday afternoon in 1974.