Bliss on Toast

not a dry martini, but Beharrell was certainly shaken and stirred on realising who his nice golf partner really was.

13th January 2021 marks the 80th anniversary of the death of James Joyce (1882-1941).

Best known for Ulysses (1922), he is regarded as one of the most influential and important authors of the 20th century. This has not always been the case.

His first book, Dubliners (1914), took nearly ten years to appear as it was rejected by numerous publishers (one even burnt the printed sheets).

Ulysses, published on Joyce’s 40th birthday, also provoked strong reactions from literary heavyweights. Edmund Gosse dismissed him as ‘a literary charlatan’.

D H Lawrence (no slouch when it comes to fruity novels) said the last part of the book was ‘the dirtiest, most indecent, most obscene thing ever written ... it is filthy...this Ulysses muck is more disgusting than Casanova.’

Meanwhile, Virginia Woolf, in a letter to fellow Bloomsbury Group member Lytton Strachey, pronounced emphatically, ‘Never did I read such tosh.’ In her diary, she said she was ‘puzzled, bored, irritated and disillusioned as by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples’.

Poor old Joyce. At least history remembers him kindly, even if his fellow writers didn’t.

While the nation has been knocked sideways by coronavirus, another pest has been stalking the land.

The heather beetle is gradually destroying vast tracts of our glorious, purple heather moors and turning them a nasty orangey brown. The beetle is currently laying waste to the North Yorkshire moors, the largest expanse of purple heather in Europe, and there are fears it will soon move into Scotland.

As autumn progresses, beetle larvae embed themselves in the heather where they will hatch in the spring.

In severe winters, many of these larvae die and the heather recovers. But the past few winters have been so mild that millions of larvae have survived, damaging the heather to such an extent that it never will recover.

The only solution is to kill the larvae by controlled burning. If you want the heather to bloom, let it burn.

For the Old Un, Christmas is Alastair Sim as Scrooge in A Christmas Carol (1951).

In A Fate Worse than Hollywood, his new memoir, screenwriter David Ambrose describes the joy of working with Sim in Siege, a 1972 play.

Sim and his wife, Naomi, rejoiced in the ways critics described him: ‘puckish’ and ‘pawky’ with ‘jowl-wobbling double-takes’. The Old Un is delighted to discover the supposedly ‘lugubrious’ (another critic’s word) Sim was a charmer in the flesh.

The Old Un is much enjoying Pen Vogler’s new book, Scoff: A History of Food and Class in Britain.

He’s horrified, though, by how often the rich try to police the diet of the poor. In 1541, Archbishop Cranmer decreed the number of dishes each rank in the clergy could eat.

On long dining tables, salt was available only at the top end – hence ‘below the salt’.

George Orwell nobly