The Old Un's Notes
A particularly awful year has come to an end, and one can only hope that this one will be better. It is not very promising, I must admit, but we can do our best to help by making appropriate New Year resolutions. One easy first step is to resolve to keep away from people with any winter diseases. Follow the example of the late writer Sir Sacheverell Sitwell, the younger brother of Dame Edith and Sir Osbert, who would not even take telephone calls from someone with a cold, let alone with anything worse. You should particularly avoid disease-ridden grandchildren whose parents bring them to visit you and say ‘we knew you’d want us to come all the same’. Make clear that you would rather they’d stayed at home.
However, it is more traditional that New Year resolutions involve one’s own sacrifices rather than anyone else’s. To give up smoking and drinking and eating jam doughnuts all come into this category, but they seem too self-interested because they are also good for one’s own health and do not help to make the world a better place for anybody else. How nice it would be if people made resolutions that had their purpose to relieve the stress to which we are constantly exposed.
These could be very small resolutions, but nevertheless significant in helping to make life more serene. One such would be if readers of the shipping forecast on BBC Radio were to pronounce correctly Cape Wrath, the most north-westerly point in mainland Britain. The word ‘Wrath’ should not be said as ‘roth’ or ‘rath’ but as ‘roarth’ (see Fowler’s Modern English Usage). It would also be helpful if sports journalists were to stop using the word ‘track’ for every sport in place of ‘course’, ‘court’, ‘wicket’, ‘green’, ‘table’ and the like.
In a world beset by the miseries of siege and famine, the proliferation of ‘dietary requirements’ in the well-fed West seems to reflect an increasingly offensive selfindulgence. Along with any invitation to a formal lunch or dinner comes a polite enquiry as to one’s gastric sensitivities: oldies are often amused by this, especially those who remember the days of powdered egg and rationed butter and meat. Dr Tom Stuttaford, in his eighties, tells me he can eat or drink anything. But he knows he is lucky. Allergic reactions to the protein in seafood can cause rashes and breathlessness, while gluten intolerance is now weirdly commonplace. One of our problems, says Dr Tom, is that we are too clean to deal with bacteria: ‘The more hygienic a country becomes, the more trouble people have with allergies.’
A friend who arranges events for a large and glamorous media company tells me her chefs have a struggle to devise menus these days, when among the guests are so many Jacks and Mrs Sprats. Some can’t eat any fish, while others won’t eat meat but can take fish. Yet others specify ‘no seafood’, while more pampered ones specify ‘no tuna or caviar’, ‘no shrimp or lobster’ and even ‘no oysters’.
The chief executive of the organisation himself has a dual aversion to ‘scallops and raspberries’. A VIP demands ‘no cheese, spice or chocolate’; one famous politician requests ‘nothing containing monosodium glutamate’; and if you ask how a famous footballer’s wife, now designing dresses, maintains her stick-insect shape, here’s how: ‘Starter: mixed green leaves (no butter, no oils); main: steamed white fish or prawns with steamed green vegetables (no butter, no oils); pudding: fruit plate (mango, grapes, pineapple).’ Bon appétit, Mrs Beckham. If only we could all aspire to such an abstemious regime in accordance with our New Year resolutions.
If you are spared of food allergies, you could consider following Edward Lear’s recipe for Gosky Patties: ‘Take a pig, three or four years of age, and tie him by the off-hind leg to a post. Place 5 pounds of carrots, 5 of sugar, 2 pecks of peas, 18 roast chestnuts, a candle, and six bushels of turnips, within his reach; if he eats these, constantly provide him with more.
‘Then, procure some cream, some slices of Cheshire cheese, four quinces of foolscap paper, and a packet of black pins. Work the whole into a paste, and spread it out to dry on a sheet of clean brown waterproof linen. When the paste is dry, but not before, proceed to beat the Pig violently, with the handle of a broom. If he squeals, beat him again.
‘Visit the paste and beat the pig alternately for some days, and ascertain if at the end of that period the whole is about to turn into Gosky Patties. If it does not then, it never will; and in that case the Pig may be let loose, and the whole process may be considered as finished.’
To keep healthy, however, we are told that we should eat at least five ‘portions’ of fruit or vegetables a day. This advice, promoted by the Department of Health for the past fifteen years,
causes anxiety among those who take it seriously because they aren’t sure what amounts to a portion. The NHS has tried to explain: two or more small-sized, one piece of medium-sized or half a piece of large fresh fruit; or two broccoli spears or four heaped tablespoons of cooked kale, spinach, spring greens or green beans; or three heaped tablespoons of cooked vegetables; or three sticks of celery; a 5cm piece of cucumber; one medium tomato or seven cherry tomatoes; or three or more heaped tablespoons of beans or pulses.
But can one imagine anybody taking the trouble to measure these garden products to achieve the required total? And how can one trust these measurements anyway? Since when has one normal tomato been equivalent to seven cherry tomatoes? Further doubts will have been caused by the conclusion of University College London in 2014 that ten portions are needed instead of five. This would mean that a person would have to eat fourteen cherry tomatoes to meet just one fifth of the daily requirement.
I am sure these guidelines are very well-intentioned, but it is difficult not to feel sceptical about them when we were told for years to drink at least eight glasses of water each day to stay healthy, only to be told later that this was all rubbish. We didn’t need to drink so much water to avoid dehydration because we absorbed large quantities of water in other ways – in fruit, vegetables, beer, tea and coffee, as well as in prepared foods. I think we should relax.
Similar uncertainty now also reigns in what counts as appropriate dress in those bulwarks of tradition, the London gentlemen’s clubs. In the Garrick Club, for example, the dress code has been relaxed in recent years to reflect the greater sartorial tolerance in society at large. It still demands that members wear ties in the main diningroom, but doesn’t require it anywhere else in the club. It still, however, draws the line at wearing the cravat, although its fine collection of theatrical portraits contains one of Sir Noël Coward wearing exactly such a piece of attire.
It is not obvious why the cravat should have been singled out for continuing disapproval, for it does at least have pretensions to smartness. It also has the slightly bounderish connotations of used car salesmen and golf club habitués; but when the instruction ‘black tie’ is now usually interpreted to mean no tie at all, this seems an inadequate objection.
I have already warned here against a ‘furry blitzkrieg’ threatened by raccoons invading this country from Germany, where the population of this originally North American species is now over one million strong. Further to a few early raccoon sightings came a new one just before Christmas by Nuala Burke, a forty-year-old teacher, who described coming across one while walking her dog Patch near her home in Levenshulme, Manchester. ‘It was really tame,’ she said. ‘It came really close to us to have a good sniff of me and Patch.’
Although charming and cuddly when young, raccoons can weigh up to 60lbs when
fully grown and can deliver nasty bites if cornered. Unfortunately they are already popular pets in Britain, where they can be bought illegally online for as little as £450 each, and their owners tend to release them when they become a bore to look after.
Left on their own, raccoons are voracious scavengers and predators, agile climbers and nimble with their paws. They not only cause great damage to lofts and outhouses they use as dens, they also carry West Nile virus and canine distemper, which kills dogs. Except to provide tails to make Davy Crockett hats, raccoons should on no account be welcomed.
It is one of the world’s most instantly recognisable images, along with the Mona Lisa, the Rev Robert Walker skating and Whistler’s Mother: that solemn couple in front of a white A-frame house with a gothic window. She wears a prim collar and cameo; he holds a pitchfork. Few could name the artist of ‘American Gothic’: it was Grant Wood, who stopped in Eldon, Iowa, one summer day in 1930 and drew the house, then imagined the puritanical couple who might live there. The woman was Wood’s sister Nan; the man was their family dentist, Dr Byron Mckeeby, both posing with reluctance. The iconic image, which first became a popular attraction at the Chicago World’s Fair of 1934, now leaves America for the first time, on show at the Royal Academy from 25th February.
Wood, a diligent young man from a strict Quaker family, pink-faced and cherubic-looking, had worked his way through college and built a cabin in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where he lived with his mother and two sisters, and filled the attic with collected curios, drawing a bohemian circle around him. The house he painted still stands, now designated a historic site, inviting tourists. The comedian Roseanne Barr and her husband Tom Arnold once planned to build a mansion next door, and posed there with apron and pitchfork – but then they split up.
Critics have sought satanic significance in the pitchfork and discerned a parody of Bible-bashing provincialism: ‘devastating satire’, Gertrude Stein called it. But Wood, who died in 1942, said he never intended to ridicule this good, solid couple. In recent years the painting has been accused of the worst crime in art circles: pandering to middleclass expectations, not challenging them. But cartoonists love to lampoon ‘American Gothic’: presidents Clinton, Carter, Johnson and Reagan were all drawn in that style when they claimed to be ‘just folks’.
When social media announced breaking news about Mick Jagger, it was widely assumed that he had died, and many tears were shed on Twitter. But the news turned out to be good. The famous rock star had simply fathered his eighth child at the age of 73. It’s amazing what some old people can manage to do, but perhaps the most common thing is just to survive against the odds. A good example is Zsa Zsa Gabor, who was nearly 100 years old when she died in December. She had been ill for years and in 2010 received last rites from a Roman Catholic priest. Surviving that crisis, she had her right leg amputated the following year to save her life from an infection, yet still she soldiered on for another five years.
She was a poor actress, but achieved enormous fame for her glamour, wealth and nine marriages. One American congressman described her as ‘the most expensive courtesan since Madame de Pompadour’, but she rejected the description by saying ‘I don’t believe in living in sin, so I always got married’. I never met her, but feel a link with her because I spent a year in the 1990s living in a house on East 63rd Street in New York that had once been occupied by her mother, Jolie Gabor, and her three racy Hungarian daughters. I rented two first-floor rooms that had been those of Zsa Zsa herself, and she must have liked the fact that it contained large expanses of mirror.