After the annual meeting comes the annual report. These arrive in our house by the ton, sent by every known organisation from Barnardo’s to Bloodstock via the Water Board and the National Gallery. I suppose their production gives work for growers of trees, manufacturers of paper, photographers, designers, the people who write them and the Post Office. That’s good, but 99 per cent of the wretched things represent a huge waste of time and money, written as they are in unreadable official language and printed on reams of shiny, expensive paper. Annual reports published for their shareholders by public companies vie with one another in richness of appearance and sheer weight. I guess the shareholders would prefer a Churchillian single sheet with the glad or sad news of the company’s results so the money saved could go towards higher dividends. But it is a question of keeping up with the Joneses, so no respectable company would agree to such lack of pomp. I have discovered one exception. It is the annual report of the National Heritage Memorial Fund. If you have had enough of heritage – English, Living, Built, Landscape, World, Gardens and the Department of National – do swallow your objection to the overworked word and have a look. The beauty of it is its clarity; never an extra word, everything is straight to the point. Instead of the usual rigmarole about financial resources or funding, even the taboo word ‘money’ is used every now and again. The organisation itself must be unique in that it has more trustees than staff, who, believe it or not, number seven. When you have taken in that amazing fact, start reading and you will see what I mean. The descriptions of jewels, woods, paintings, manuscripts, a shingle beach, a fairground king’s living wagon, a bit of the Brecon Beacons, a tractor, a colliery, drawings by Gainsborough, Raphael and Co., Somerset cornfields, several church interiors, a trades union banner, a smashing portrait by Lawrence, a croft in Caithness, garden tools and an organ which have received grants are a delight. The accompanying photographs of such disparate beneficiaries make one pleased to be a taxpayer. No government department, no waste, no messing about; the grants they can give go straight to these diverse and needy places and things. And now their money is to be reduced from £12 million to £7 million. Remind yourself, please, that the fund was established as a memorial to those who have died for this country. Their number has not diminished. Roll on the National Lottery and may the NHMF get a whopping share of whatever is going. Meanwhile, congratulations to Lord Rothschild, chairman, and Georgina Naylor, director, for the work they do for us.
As a regular listener to the early morning programme on Radio 4 called Today, I am fascinated by the fact that the people who are interviewed find it impossible to answer a question with a simple yes or no. I except politicians because woolly answers are their style, but lots of people are quizzed on every subject under the sun and they all hover about uncertainly. The last few mornings, I have written down the replies which mean yes but are more complicated. Here are some of the most often repeated: ‘certainly’, or, to spin it out a bit, ‘most certainly’; ‘I agree’; ‘exactly’; ‘indeed’, or, playing for time while they are pondering what they might be asked next, ‘indeed that is so’; ‘absolutely’ (‘absolutely’ is rather new, but is getting more common); ‘you’re right’ – ‘that’s right’ – ‘that’s perfectly right’ – or just the fashionable ‘right’; ‘true’ or ‘very true’; ‘definitely’; ‘of course’; ‘very much so’; ‘precisely’; and ‘I hope so’ with a little laugh and the emphasis on hope. How I long for someone to say yes, if that is what is meant. It would have the advantage of surprising the cruel questioner so much he would be silenced. The radio abhors a vacuum – so does an interviewer. I shall keep listening and perhaps one morning someone will manage it. But the ultimate joy would be to hear the answer ‘I don’t know’.
The world of consultants, which has appeared out of nowhere in the last few years, is a thriving off-shoot of whichever trade or industry it professes to know all about. Not so long ago professionals were trained in their profession and it would have been an insult to suggest that an outsider probe into the affairs of a company.
Not so now that consultants have arrived. Investing in a new enterprise, or upgrading an old one, be it a restaurant to feed visitors at Chatsworth or arrangements to ease the flow of customers round our Farm Shop, is extremely expensive, so it is thought prudent to consult a consultant before plunging into the unknown. Woman’s Intuition is not to be trusted. The consultant is the one to go by.
He arrives from London, first class on the train, with a couple of acolytes, consultants in the making. Most probably he has never been this far north, so the geography and the ways of the locals have to be explained, all taking his valuable time. After a suitable pause of a few weeks (he is very busy being consulted) a beautiful book arrives, telling you what you spent the day telling him. It is written on paper about which he has consulted a consultant. The paper consultant has consulted a design consultant, and someone deep in an office has drawn a logo, without which no self-respecting consultant can practise his consultancy.
The result is a ream of paper the size of a tennis court, logo to the fore, and the address (which you might conceivably want) flanked by telephone, telex and fax number in fairy writing at the bottom.
You and your colleagues spend some time translating the book into plain English. You meet to discuss it and decide to do what you thought of doing before going to the consultant.
Almost at once a huge bill arrives topped up by first-class travel expenses and more meals than you can imagine three men could possibly eat in a day. It has all added considerably to the cost but you pay with the comfortable feeling that you have consulted the best consultant in the business.
The word luxury seems to be bandied about in a curious way these days. People’s ideas of what it means vary enormously. I’m never quite sure what a ‘luxury flat’ is, though I believe it should have running water and a radiator or two. Better than not having them, I admit, but what is real luxury?
For me, a winter weekend sticks in the memory. I was staying with an artist and his wife in Dorset. I can’t remember if there was central heating, but I do remember my hostess coming into my room before breakfast, her head tied in a duster like Miss Moppet, laying and lighting a coal fire for her guest to dress by. If you’ve never dressed in front of a coal fire you don’t know what luxury is. They also had half a cow – the farmer had the other half – which meant they had not only proper cream but real butter, a rare commodity indeed.
I can’t help comparing that house with many bigger, richer, electric fired households, some of which are the centre of hundreds of acres of their own farms, milking big herds of cows. But no one can be bothered to skim and churn, and thereby profit from what they own by producing what is described in old-fashioned cookery books as ‘best butter’. My Dorset friends win the luxury stakes hands down. A coal fire, half an acre and half a cow, that’s the thing.
A new word which is used to describe anything from houses to holidays is ‘affordable’. Surely what Lord Lloyd-Webber and an unemployed miner can afford are not the same, yet it is trotted out as equally applicable to all. I imagine it means cheap, so why not say so?
The other day I went to Harrods to look for a coat for a friend who can’t go shopping. After all these years I still miss the bank on the ground floor, and the green leather seats where my sisters and I used to meet and sit and talk and laugh so loudly that the other customers got annoyed. Now there is a slippery marble floor and fierce young ladies sell all the same make-up things under different names. You can’t talk and you certainly don’t feel like laughing. But it was what happened outside that struck me as so odd. It was pelting with rain and a gale was blowing, people’s umbrellas turning inside out like Flying Robert’s in Struwwelpeter. A smart car with a chauffeur drew up and an old, cross, rich couple got out. The woman had a mink coat slung over her shoulders, which fell into the road and the dirty water. The commissionaire dashed to pick it up, shook it and hung it on her again. He opened the door for her
and her beastly husband, who didn’t lift a finger to help. She walked straight through without looking round. ‘Didn’t that woman say thank you?’ I asked the commissionaire. ‘Oh no,’ he answered, ‘they never do.’
Packaging has gone too far and the simplest things have become impossible to open. If you buy a toothbrush or a pen or tweezers you need a strong and sharp pair of scissors to cut through the armour plating of plastic which encases them. No house has enough scissors so you go out and buy some. But they are similarly encapsulated in a thick shiny film, which human hands and nails are not designed to penetrate. You pull, drag, stamp and bite but to no avail. You can see your longed for object in its close-fitting jacket, shining and clean, which makes it all the more desirable, but there is no hope of getting at it. You buy another pair of scissors and another, till they are ranged alongside the things they are meant to open. If there is a Scissor Package Opener lurking among the terrifying objects in John Bell & Croyden you may be sure it will be aseptically sealed so only a scalpel will do the job.
A few days after this piece was published, an anonymous scalpel arrived by post and happiness set in.
Buying water in bottles to drink at home must be one of the oddest crazes of the last few years. All right, I know London water tastes horrible and Nanny would say don’t touch it, darling, you don’t know where it’s been (sometimes they tell us where it’s been, which proves Nanny to be right), but most water tastes the same as the bottled kind and is perfectly good just as it comes out of the tap. Beautiful pictures on the labels and names which conjure up moorland streams, most likely to be stuffed with liver fluke, appeal to the gullible shoppers. Once bought, the heavy bottles have to be lugged back to the car as there is not much pleasure in a guilty gulp of water in the shop. The choice seems endless. Bottles of all shapes and sizes and even colours (the blue one is very pretty) fill the shelves of grocers’ shops already given over as much to dog, cat and bird food as that for humans. I suppose people will soon be buying water for pets or they will be accused of discriminating against them. Think of the number of lorries carrying this extraordinary cargo all over the country, getting in the way of things that matter, like you and me going for a spin. But the astonishing thing is the price. Please note that milk costs 43p a litre (it averages 23p to the farmer, by the way), petrol is a little over 50p a litre, and still water, would you believe it, costs up to 79p for the same quantity. As a shopkeeper, I must think up some other pointless commodities with which to fuddle the good old public.
We have heard a lot lately about two men sharing a bed in a French hotel and the usual speculation as to what may have happened in it.9 You only have to go a little way back to discover that travellers often had to share a bed whether they chose to or not. In the 1750s, Henry Cavendish, the famous scientist, and his brother Frederick journeyed to Paris together. When they arrived in Calais they stopped at an inn and had to sleep in a room where someone was already in bed. It was a corpse laid out for burial. (The Cavendish family were famed for silence until a timely injection of Cecil blood in the last generation set them talking more than most.) Lord Brougham wrote of Henry, ‘He probably uttered fewer words in the course of his life than any man who lived to fourscore years and ten, not excepting the monks of La Trappe.’ Nothing was said by the laconic pair till they were well on the road next morning. Eventually Frederick said, ‘Brother, did you see?’ ‘Yes, I did, brother,’ Henry answered. Just think what would happen now. First the hotel manager would be sent for and given a dressing-down, as he often is by spoilt travellers who don’t like finding a dead person in their room. Then the rich headlines would follow: ‘Duke’s nephews practise necrophilia in French hotel’. And there is the question of incest…
The other day I was on my way to London airport, ridiculously early for the plane as usual. I stopped to fortify myself for the journey by looking round Chiswick House. It never disappoints or fails to inspire and fill the observer with wonder. It was a horrible day and the only other people were a party of Americans, the most knowledgeable acting as guide. One asked, ‘Which is the portrait of Pope?’ The woman said, ‘There he is. You can always tell Alexander Pope. He’s kinda skinny.’
Journalists and even ordinary people have a strange new habit of leaving out the Christian name when writing about women. It immediately turns the subject into a different person. I cannot recognise my sisters Nancy and Diana as Mitford and Mosley, or another sister when she becomes Treuhaft (though she is sometimes Mitford too, and then confusion reigns). And something unnatural happens to that most feminine of human beings, the American Ambassador to France, when she is referred to so baldly as Harriman. I think it started a few years ago with criminals. Somehow it is all right for Hindley and other murderesses as they hardly deserve a Christian name anyway, but it is extremely muddling when applied to normal women. I don’t mind about Thatcher, Bottomley and Beckett. Having chosen the dotty career of politics, which turns them into Aunt Sallys from the day they were elected, they can stand up for themselves. Must we now drop the Aunt? If so, Sally is no good alone and anyway we’re back to a Christian name. What a conundrum. I can’t see why the reporters do it. It surely isn’t to save space – just look at the acres of paper they have to cover with something: acres which become hectares on Sundays. Perhaps it is to do with them not liking the idea of women being proper women. The female journalists are very quaint and contrary, so we can expect something outlandish from them. I suppose it doesn’t matter much, but when Hillary is in the news and she turns into Clinton, it does make one blink a bit.
Can we do away with: women who want to join men’s clubs, Cupressus Leylandii, bits of paper that fall out of magazines and, lately, bits of paper which fall out of those bits of paper, people who say (and write) ‘talking with’ when they mean ‘to’, flowers in fireplaces, magpies, writing paper with the address at the bottom or, worse, the American trick of putting the address on the back of the envelope which you throw away and then have to retrieve, female weather forecasters, drivers who slow down to go over cattle grids, hotel coat-hangers, Canada geese, ‘partners’, liquid soap machines where the thing you press to get the stuff out is invisible, sparrow-hawks, audience participation, punning newspaper headlines and locked gates? And can we bring back: scythes, sharps and middlings, Invalid Bovril, brogues, mourning, silence, housewives, telegrams, spring cleaning, snow in January instead of at lambing time, nurses in uniform, muffins, the 1662 Prayer Book, pinafores for little boys, fish shops, Bud Flanagan, Ethel Merman and Elvis Presley?
The television and the radio delight in feeding a morbid interest in illness and accidents with an ever-increasing number of programmes showing frightful things happening to people. Green-clad surgeons getting their heads and hands together over some bit of body, stretchers bringing a harvest of victims of horrifying accidents, and a difficult birth or two vie with each other to delight us. Turning on the radio, hoping for a cheery tune, I heard, ‘Yes, blood blisters on the roof of the mouth can be very unpleasant.’ I should jolly well think they could, but blood blisters are the least of the horrors on offer. If you happen to be even vaguely well you feel guilty because you aren’t suffering like these unfortunates. Switch the thing off, you say. Well, of course, that’s right. But lots of people must enjoy such ghoulish entertainment or it wouldn’t be broadcast.
I notice the heavy (literally) newspapers have their individual ways with obituaries. The Times usually writes at length about a black American jazz musician who may, or may not, have played in a band with Fats Waller (of blessed memory). They sometimes throw in a grey-faced scientist from Eastern Europe who knew all about some abstruse speciality, a closed book to lesser mortals.
The Daily Telegraph describes the deeds of war heroes, illustrated with photos of these handsome men when in their twenties, smart as paint in uniform, with straight partings in their thick hair. The descriptions of their gallantry in winning DSOs, MCs and DFCs with a bar or two, read like thrillers and mak
e one marvel that they survived into their eighties.
The Guardian recalls many a dreary politician and their boring, worthy lives, and sometimes one of the judges who make headlines by a surprising judgement or the classic questions only judges dare ask, like what is a Land Rover.
The Independent goes steadily about its business and can be relied on for accuracy and funniness, usually lacking in others. Few can resist a fashionable dig at the deceased. The smallest peccadillo is dragged up and enlarged upon in an otherwise blameless life devoted to public service.
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