Gyles Brandreth’s Diary
She’s quite right to tell me off – I’ve just broken her wrist
As I write, I haven’t had my vaccine yet.
As an Oxford man (New College, 1967-70), naturally I am hoping for the Oxford jab, but I’ll settle for whatever I am given whenever I get it. All my friends in their eighties have had their first dose and quite a few have had the follow-up jab as well. It’s been very well organised in my part of south-west London. There is even talk of a 24-hour service.
When I told my wife I didn’t fancy getting up in the middle of the night to secure my jab, she said, rather sharply, ‘I don’t see why – you get up to go to the loo at 2.30 and 4am most nights, don’t you?’
My wife has taken to making sharp remarks in recent weeks – with reason. Just before Christmas, returning from the shops, we took a short cut down an unfamiliar side street. She was striding ahead, as she does. I was trotting behind, as I do. I was also looking up at the sky, instead of looking where I was going.
Just as I began to say, ‘It looks like rain,’ I stumbled on the root of a tree that was sticking out of the pavement and tumbled on top of my unfortunate spouse, knocking her to the ground. She broke her wrist in the process. ‘Pardon me, Gyles, you broke my wrist in the process.’
The good news is, eight weeks on, thanks to the ministrations of the A&E department at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, she’s very much on the mend. Her hand is out of the cast. I don’t have to cut up her food for her any more.
The bad news is I’m still doing the cooking. I keep it simple: baked beans on toast, baked beans on a baked potato, fish fingers and baked beans, baked beans with a poached egg on top, and so long as there is a glass of chilled white wine to help wash it down and a Magnum ice cream for pudding she seems happy enough.
We have a break from baked beans on a Sunday. That’s when I do my signature tuna mayonnaise on a baked potato, with steamed broccoli and carrots on the side. Through all this, to be serious, the steamer and frozen meals from a company called Cook have proved invaluable.
We try to eat at the table and not off trays on our knees in front of the TV because we are beginning to think this COVID thing is going to go on for ever and we need to retain our sanity.
We are watching the news only once a day (usually at lunchtime: we reckon it’s presented less stridently then). In the evening, we allow ourselves only one programme per night so that whatever we watch feels like an ‘event’.
Our go-to channels are Netflix and Talking Pictures. On the former, we have loved Call My Agent, Emily in Paris, The Queen’s Gambit and Schitt’s Creek, to name just a few.
On Talking Pictures, where they specialise in British movies from the 1940s to the 1960s, we love the lot. I am totally smitten with Glynis Johns (now 97) and my wife has the hots for the late Kenneth More. (If you can, catch him in The Comedy Man, 1964. It’s an underrated classic.)
Our New Year treat was The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby (1947), which nobody rates because it came out the year after David Lean’s universally acclaimed Great Expectations. It’s not so cinematic, perhaps, but it’s just as dramatic and stars the great Sir Cedric Hardwicke as Ralph Nickleby and my friend and mentor, Cyril Fletcher, as an amusing Mr Mantalini.
There’s a reason I have been thinking about Cyril Fletcher. It is 50 years this month since I first chaired a panel game for BBC Radio 4. A Rhyme in Time was a comedy quiz with a poetry twist. Cyril Fletcher, a comedian famous for his Odd Odes, and the writer Caryl Brahms were the team captains.
At the end of the series, Miss Brahms gave me a hideous tie as a present. She said, ‘I’ve left the receipt in the box so you can change it. You won’t like it – nobody does.’ When I went to the shop in Jermyn Street to change the tie, the manager said, ‘You must be a friend of Miss Brahms. She buys the same tie by the dozen and gives it to all her friends.’
Cyril Fletcher said he would like to give me a small picture by his friend the artist Edward Seago. He forgot, which is a shame because I see Messum’s Gallery is now selling Seagos for £40,000.
And, speaking of Seago, my friend Octavia Pollock, when working as a sub-editor on Country Life, once wrote an inadvertently memorable caption to accompany a portrait of the artist: ‘The Queen Mother loved his paintings so much that he gave her one every Christmas and birthday.’
Gyles’s latest book is The Oxford Book of Theatrical Anecdotes (OUP)