The Old Un’s Notes
Welcome to the Old Un’s Election-free Notes! For 49 years, John Julius Norwich, writer and great friend to The Oldie, sent out his favourite quotes in a little booklet, his Christmas Cracker.
When he died last year, aged 88, he’d just finished his 50th Cracker. His posthumous new book, The Ultimate Christmas Cracker, includes that last Cracker and the best of the previous 49.
The Old Un’s favourite entry comes courtesy of child star Shirley Temple:
‘I stopped believing in Santa Claus when I was six. Mother took me to see him in a department store and he asked for my autograph.’
It is with a heavy heart that the Old Un says farewell to Paul Bailey, our hallowed theatre critic since 2010.
Paul, 82, is the perfect theatre reviewer. He began his professional life as an actor, from 1956 to 1964, after the Central School of Speech and Drama. And then he became a distinguished novelist and playwright. So he knew whereof he wrote when he reviewed plays for The Oldie.
You can continue to read Paul in his marvellous novel, At the Jerusalem. His first novel, published in 1967, it won the Somerset Maugham Award – and it’s now been released in a new edition.
Although Paul was a mere lad of 30 when he wrote the book, he captured his subject matter – an old people’s home called The Jerusalem – perfectly.
The writer Colm Toibin, who has written a new introduction, calls the book ‘a high-wire act, with not a sound or a piece of dialogue left unchiselled, not a false note’.
The theatre at Oldie Towers dims its lights. Au revoir, Paul.
When it comes to publishing events, nothing can beat the new book Hand Dryers, by Samuel
Ryde, to be published in February 2020. Hand dryers from Ukraine to Los Angeles are featured.
A spokesman for Unicorn, the publishers, says some hand dryers ‘ooze nightclub sex appeal and dazzle; some a clinical sleekness; others a workhorse charm. The stories they could tell.’
Oh, how the Old Un wishes he could go to the launch party. Will all the guests congregate around the hand dryers in the lav?
Our new theatre critic, Nicholas Lezard, has a new book out: It Gets Worse – Adventures in Love, Loss and Penury, published on 15th December.
A collection of his Down and Out columns for the New Statesman, the book is a peerless description of the life of the broke literary hack, separated from his wife, and living in what he calls ‘the Hovel’.
Here is a typical entry: ‘Why shower every day? No one else is going to be smelling me for a while. And showering in a cold house is a drag. With the heating off during the day, the thing is to stay in bed until it comes on at six or so, which by an amazing coincidence is also wine o’clock.’
At one point, Lezard describes his column’s godfather as the late Jeffrey Bernard’s Low Life column in the Spectator. In fact, Lezard’s column is the son and heir to Bernard’s column – and a bedfellow of our own dear gentleman of the road, Wilfred De’ath.
All three writers may not have made much money – but they’ve spun literary gold out of penury.