The Oldie

The Old Un’s Notes

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Were you one of those schoolboys who in 1973 salivated about the new range of ‘pocket money’ model kits of tanks, warplanes and ships?

The Matchbox kits were cheap and simple to make, with tremendous, nostalgic power for Second World War buffs.

Fans will love The Golden Years of Matchbox Art, a new book by Roy Huxley, now in his eighties.

Huxley painted the pictures for practicall­y all the boxes over nearly 20 years.

Here is his stirring picture of the Supermarin­e Spitfire Mk IX, Britain’s most famous short-range, high-performanc­e Second World War aircraft, with its Merlin engine and its distinctiv­e roar.

More than 20,000 of them were built between 1938 and 1948. The Mk IX was the most-produced version after it entered service in 1942.

Chocks away, chaps!

Fran Lebowitz, the New York writer, is only 70 but she’s long since establishe­d herself as an oldie deity – as the goddess of grumbling.

She’s been famous in New York for over half a century, since Andy Warhol hired her as a columnist on his Interview magazine.

But she’s only just beginning to be appreciate­d this side of the pond, thanks to the series of interviews she gave to Martin Scorsese this year in the Netflix series Pretend It’s a City.

Now oldies can luxuriate in her heavenly grumbles in The Fran Lebowitz Reader (Virago), published this September.

Here is her golden advice to teenagers: ‘Think before you speak. Read before you think. This will give you something to think about that you didn’t make up yourself – a wise move at any age, but most especially at 17, when you are in danger of coming to annoying conclusion­s.’

Another of her wise suggestion­s to the young is ‘Remember that as a teenager you are at the last stage in your life when you will be happy that the phone is for you.’

Best of all, though, is her eternal wisdom on why we all get annoyed but shouldn’t try to destroy the person who annoys us. She wrote it long before Cancel Culture became a thing, but it has never been so true:

‘I would be the very last to criticise the annoyed. I myself find many – even most – things objectiona­ble. Being offended is the natural consequenc­e of leaving one’s home. I do not like aftershave lotion, adults who roller-skate, children who speak French or anyone who is unduly tan. I do not, however, go around

enacting legislatio­n and putting up signs.’

Oh, and what’s more, the immaculate­ly dressed Lebowitz loves Savile Row clothes and hates leisurewea­r with inane sentences printed all over it. You’re always welcome at Oldie Towers for a good old grumble with the Old Un, Fran!

The architectu­ral historian and herald John Martin Robinson proudly trumpets himself as an ‘Archetypal Young Fogey of the 1970s’ in his new memoir, Holland Blind Twilight.

Robinson contribute­d to the Spectator in the 1980s when, as he puts it, the magazine rejoiced in ‘the dominance of fogeydom’.

A N Wilson was the literary editor. Charles Moore was the editor and James Knox was the publisher – and biographer of Robinson’s fogey heroes Robert Byron and Osbert Lancaster.

The Spectator cook was Jennifer Paterson (1928-99), later famous as one of the Two Fat Ladies in the cookery programme of that name.

When Paterson died, she left her emerald ring – which so mesmerised hygiene-obsessed viewers when she was mixing dough – to Clare Asquith, deputy literary editor at the Spectator. She left Robinson a Victorian silver Stilton scoop.

Robinson gives Paterson his ultimate accolade – as ‘an honorary Young Fogey’. It sparks the question – can women be fogeys? Any suggestion­s for candidates gratefully received by the Old Un.

There is only a brief mention of a succeeding editor of the Spectator, one Boris Johnson. Robinson declares him to be ‘lazy, amoral, ambitious, selfcentre­d’. He adds that Johnson ‘seemed to spend most of his time bonking Petronella Wyatt on the seat of a car in the garage in Brownlow Mews’.

Surely time for a blue plaque – but should it be over the garage or on the car seat?

The story of the survival of St Melangell’s Shrine, hidden away for 400 years in the walls of an isolated church in the Berwyn Mountains of mid-wales, is enough to make the most hardened cynic believe in miracles.

It’s told in Peter Stanford’s If These Stones Could Talk: A History of Christiani­ty in Britain and Ireland Told Through Twenty Buildings (Hodder). Pictured is a line drawing of the church by architect Stephen Tsang.

The shrine’s richly carved casing was originally part of a Norman church that recalled a community of independen­tminded seventh-century holy women. Judged too ‘popish’ by Henry VIII’S reforming lieutenant­s, it was condemned to be smashed to smithereen­s.

The locals, though, were no pushover and quietly resisted the central diktat by dismantlin­g it section by section and hiding it in the thick north wall of the church until the madness passed.

That took a while, and it was only in the 1980s when a new vicar, Paul Davies, and his wife, Evelyn, rescued it from eternal entombment in the walls and rebuilt it piece by piece.

Today, standing on the

altar of this remote church in a magical valley that seems to exist in a world of its own, it is revered by experts as the finest – and probably leastknown – Romanesque shrine structure in the whole of northern Europe.

Who can forget the immortal Rupert Rigsby, as played to perfection by Leonard Rossiter in Rising Damp (1974-78) on ITV?

And just as Eric Chappell was writing Rising Damp, he had another hit series in The Squirrels (1974-77), also on ITV. And now he’s releasing the scripts as a book, also called The Squirrels.

The three series were about the office of an accounts department of a Tv-rental company. Instead of working, the staff bunked off and had office romances. Chappell based the series on his 22 years of office life as an auditor for the East Midlands Electricit­y Board.

Eric Chappell, happily still with us at 88, says of The Squirrels, ‘No one liked the title but I refused to change it, showing all the arrogance of a beginner.

‘It was inspired by a poem by Alfred Noyes which dealt with the frustrated hopes and ambitions of a young clerk – my feelings at the time.’

The idea was accepted by ATV – ‘With great reluctance,’ Chappell diffidentl­y says. Still, it rose to number one in the TV charts in the first series.

In many ways, the series, starring Bernard Hepton and Ken Jones, pre-empted The Office by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant by nearly 30 years.

Hysterecto­mies aren’t much fun – but Oldie reader Suzanne Peel managed to see the funny side in a consultati­on with her surgeon just before her own op.

CONSULTANT: Good morning.

SUZANNE: Good morning, Mr P.

CONSULTANT (filling in a form): Now, let’s see, are you still at the same address? SUZANNE: Yes. CONSULTANT: And you have two children.

SUZANNE: Yes.

 ??  ?? There’ll be Spitfires over the White Cliffs of Dover
There’ll be Spitfires over the White Cliffs of Dover
 ??  ??
 ??  ?? Queen of the grumblers: Fran Lebowitz
Queen of the grumblers: Fran Lebowitz
 ??  ?? ‘As it turned out, dog heaven was also cat hell’
‘As it turned out, dog heaven was also cat hell’
 ??  ?? A welcome in the hillside: St Melangell’s Church, Pennant Melangell, by Stephen Tsang
A welcome in the hillside: St Melangell’s Church, Pennant Melangell, by Stephen Tsang
 ??  ?? Fogey AGM: Martin Robinson and Jennifer Paterson after Mass
Fogey AGM: Martin Robinson and Jennifer Paterson after Mass
 ??  ??
 ??  ?? Have you met Miss Jones? Leonard Rossiter as Rigsby
Have you met Miss Jones? Leonard Rossiter as Rigsby
 ??  ?? ‘317 millimetre­s’
‘317 millimetre­s’

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