Ephraim Hardcastle
WITH baby August cosily ensconced in Kensington Palace after parents Princess Eugenie and Jack Brooksbank vacated Frogmore Cottage, the Windsor retreat continues as a costly financial millstone for Harry and Meghan. Last September Harry revealed that he’d paid refurbishment costs and advance rent for an undisclosed period. A spokesman said Frogmore ‘will remain the UK residence of the duke and his family’. But with final confirmation of their new permanent life abroad, how long before the couple contact the Crown Estate and ask for release from the expensive leasehold on their brief, erstwhile home?
TWO years before Francis Bacon’s lover George Dyer died the painter bought a house in Dyer’s native East End (Narrow Street) to reside among gangsters like the Kray twins, explaining: ‘I have bought the house in which I shall be murdered.’ But to Bacon’s fury, a member of Harold Wilson’s Labour government moved in across the road. ‘It changed from a slightly seedy and raffish backwater into one of the best protected and most carefully guarded streets in London,’ states Bacon’s new biography Revelations. The artist quickly packed his easel and sold up. And the neighbour who inadvertently drove him out? Dr David Owen.
PIERCE Brosnan’s Irish accent, eulogising the Atlantic coastline in a promotional video for the Irish Tourist Board, prompts Hibernian giggles. The former James Bond, pictured, joins the ranks of cringe-making enunciators Emily Blunt, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Does Pierce’s mysterious pronunciation stem from his adopted London or his more recent abode in Hawaii? ‘I’m a Navan man,’ he says, sheepishly. ‘That’s in County Meath.’
MARTHA Kearney, discussing Sir Paul McCartney’s forthcoming collaboration with Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon, asks about Macca’s 1968 composition Martha My Dear: ‘A song which seems so romantic to me, until somebody told me it was written for Paul McCartney’s dog. Please, please, tell me it’s really written for a girl called Martha?’ Ruefully, Muldoon confirms to the BBC Radio 4 Today show presenter that the ex-Beatle was inspired by his sheepdog Martha, adding: ‘It turns out to be a love song to all of us... including yourself.’
COMPLAINING that only two Premier League footballers, Marcos Alonso and Patrick Bamford, possess proper haircuts, Jonathan Meades describes former England forward Theo Walcott’s hairstyle in The Critic: ‘On his head he wears a sheaf of unidentifiable vegetable matter or a cottage loaf placed by a prankster which no one has dared tell him about.’ Cheer up Theo, hairdressers resume clipping in April!
WHILE Prince Harry’s RFU patronage has reverted to the Queen, she is not a dedicated rugby fan. But she’s aware Mike Tindall, married to grand-daughter Zara, was once handy with the oval ball, remarking to former Irish captain Brian O’Driscoll: ‘Your nose is in considerably better shape than Mike Tindall’s.’