The Old Un’s Notes
When it comes to elections, the Old Un sits very firmly and comfortably on the fence.
He takes as his mantra the great Buddhist saying, ‘Don’t just do something; sit there!’
Whoever triumphs, there is one comfort – at least an oldie will win the general election. On 8th June, Theresa May will be 60 and Jeremy Corbyn will be 68. It will be the first time both main candidates in a general election have been 60 or over since 1945, when a 62-yearold Clement Attlee beat a 70-year-old Churchill.
In between, we’ve had some horrifyingly young Prime Ministers. When he first came to power, David Cameron was only 43 – the same age as Tony Blair in 1997. John Major was just 47 when he got to No 10; Gordon Brown was 56. Even Margaret Thatcher was a sprightly 53 when she took office in 1979.
Farewell, then, callow youths who know next to nothing about the world. Welcome to the deep wisdom that comes with age.
The battle between old age and youth is movingly captured in Sound: Stories of Hearing Lost and Found, Bella Bathurst’s new memoir about losing her hearing at the age of only 28.
Bathurst honestly admits that one of the difficult things about deafness is that it is usually associated with old age. She confesses to having uncharitable thoughts as she realised she was going deaf so young.
‘At the time, deaf meant two things to me: stupid and old,’ she writes. ‘My impression was that old people were always deaf. Deafness was what happened when bits of you started wearing out. Deafness was what happened at the end, not the beginning.’
Gradually, though, Bathurst becomes more understanding of the perils of old age. She realises that the old find deafness just as upsetting as she does; that it’s a rite of passage for them, too, and they don’t much like passing into the dark land of the silent.
There is a happy ending to the story. Bathurst thought she was permanently deaf, thanks to head injuries in her twenties, in a skiing accident and a car crash. It turns out that her deafness was due to a bone abnormality in her ears, easily cured by an operation. Suddenly, twenty years after losing her hearing, the sound was switched on again.
Hercule Poirot would be delighted. Pince-nez – the spectacles which clamp over the nose, with no need to be strapped to the ears – are back!
The Old Un thought they were a thing of the past, popular with Teddy Roosevelt, G K Chesterton and W B Yeats.
It turns out that two companies, Nooz Optics and THINOPTICS, are now flogging them. Their websites show hip, young professionals carving out stellar careers and forming rewarding personal relationships, all thanks to the amazing power of the pince-nez clasped to their noses.
In an age obsessed with small, simple devices – ipods, ipad minis – pince-nez make brilliant retro sense. The THINOPTICS pince-nez are, in fact, designed to be fixed to the back of mobile phones.
How long before Apple ruthlessly capitalises on this growing market to develop the ipince-nez?
The Old Un is astonished at the postbag received in the Oldie office in response to Quentin Letts’s Olden Life feature in the June issue, ‘What were Izal and Bronco?’
A huge amount of readers were whisked back to the halcyon days of thin, sheeny lavatory paper. A small sample of their thoughts appears in this issue’s letters page.
Some readers were even nostalgic for those days of extreme sanitary discomfort. It just goes to show that anything can seem
sweet if it’s associated with your youth and is no longer available. Anyone for whale meat?
One of Jeremy Corbyn’s suggestions is to bump up the number of bank holidays, with new ones in honour of Britain’s patron saints: on St David’s Day (1st March), St Patrick’s Day (17th March), St George’s Day (23rd April) and St Andrew’s Day (30th November).
It’s a surprisingly Christian idea, backed up by his Easter message, which was more Christian than the message from Theresa May, the vicar’s daughter. It also turned the tide that has, in recent decades, been in favour of secular holidays.
Whitsun, seven Sundays after the moon-dependent
feast of Easter, was turned into a fixed spring bank holiday in 1965. The secular tendency was re-enforced by Michael Foot in 1978, when, as Employment Secretary, he introduced the early spring holiday on 1st May, aligning
the United Kingdom with the then Communist bloc’s International Workers’ Day. The secularists would also like to deprive Easter of its Christian significance by making it a fixed date. They may forget that, in doing so, they would also lose Easter’s immemorial seasonal connection with the cycle of the moon.
Whoever wins the election, the government would do well to get rid of the superfluous Michael Foot Day. No one needs another holiday between Easter and Whitsun. But we could all do with a revival of the old tradition of an autumn festival, still observed in most countries, between the August bank holiday and Christmas.
The last ten days of October are half-term; so a bank holiday to ease the exhausting winter term would probably be most welcome in late September or November. Michaelmas (St Michael’s Day), which still denotes the start of the academic year, is 29th September, when the weather is often at its Indiansummer prime. In November, Americans have Thanksgiving. Christians have Martinmas (11th November), which coincides with Armistice Day.
The Monday following Martinmas – or Jeremy Corbyn’s suggestion of St Andrew’s Day, on 30th November – would be an appropriate day for our thanksgiving.
The French presidential election bequeathed a useful term, which could be pleasurably incorporated into the English language.
The main campaign slogan of Jean-luc Mélenchon, the far Left candidate, was ‘ dégagisme’, which means, roughly, ‘kick them out’. It was aimed at French political elites, bankers and bosses.
But the word also neatly encapsulates an international desire to take on complacent, ruling interests. The Arab Spring, Brexit, even Donald Trump – they all benefited from an infectious popular taste for dégagisme. You could also apply the term to the current fad for decluttering and turning hoarders’ homes into minimalist deserts.
Look closely at royal walkabouts, from Jamaica to Kensington Palace, and a familiar face can be spotted in the background.
The face belongs to Hugo Vickers, royal expert and biographer of the Duchess of Windsor. For many years, he has been scouting out Commonwealth Walkways across the globe – new, signposted walks, from Ascension Island to Malta to New Zealand, that guide you to unusual parts of Commonwealth towns, while telling you a bit about the Queen as you stroll along.
It’s not always an arduous task, particularly when it involves visiting Caribbean islands for weeks at a stretch. Still, it’s an ambitious venture. Seventy-one walkways are planned – although there might end up being 100 of them – and 26 have already been built.
Is the Old Un the only person to bemoan wheelie suitcases? In principle, they’re a brilliant idea. In practice, they mean that people are now enabled to wheel leviathan cases, full of clothes they can’t possibly need. They’re so big that they’re often beyond people’s control, wildly swinging from left to right as their owners negotiate the travelator between airport terminals.
Even when properly controlled, they increase the footprint occupied by each traveller. Humans, who once occupied a spot not much bigger than their feet, now dominate a huge area, encompassed by their wheelie case and the space beneath their outstretched arm as it directs these monsters. Suddenly, it’s impossible to negotiate your way across a station concourse without bumping into one of these swivelling obstacles.
The Old Un has also spotted a related phenomenon: the bigger the suitcase, the worse dressed the owner. Thrusting young businessmen and air stewardesses look immaculate as they propel their tiny executive cases ahead of them; gargantuan tourists in T-shirts and shorts are accompanied by wardrobes on wheels. More means less.
George Osborne’s new job as a newspaperman – he is now editor of the Evening Standard – has prompted memories of other literary politicians.
Geoff Andrews, a biographer and Oldie reader, is currently writing a memoir of Cyril Lakin, his uncle’s uncle. In the 1940s, Lakin was assistant editor and literary editor of the Sunday Times, while he was Conservative MP for Llandaff and Barry. He also found time to present Beyond Westminster, a BBC politics show on the radio. In the 1930s, Lakin, the son of a master butcher from Birmingham, pulled off an even more unusual double – he was literary editor of the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times at the same time.
What an extraordinary figure he sounds. In his biography of Cyril Connolly (one of Lakin’s reviewers), Jeremy Lewis, our much lamented, late deputy editor, describes Lakin as ‘a dashing Welshman, with a weakness for wide-lapelled suits, cocktail shakers and playing golf in orange plus fours’.
Lakin lost his seat in the 1945 Labour landslide. In 1948, aged only 54, he was killed in a car crash. What a lot to pack into such a short life.