Spectator Life

If you work in politics, chances are you have drunk in the Westminster Arms. Located just off Parliament Square, every night it hosts the collection of hacks, wonks and mandarins that comprise the SW1 bubble. For 30 years, Gerry Dolan has run the pub with his mix of Irish humour and no-nonsense determination. When we meet, three days before his retirement, his roving eyes still flick up every time to scan each new patron that enters his beloved bar. ‘I have loved the Westminster Arms. It's been a great mistress’ he says. ‘My wife ran the wine bar downstairs, and she probably worked harder than I did. I was like a Redcoat, really.’ Dolan is one of a dying breed of lifelong landlords in the capital, tied to one establishment.

Those of us who grew up with a traditional Halloween, that is to say, in Ireland, don’t have much truck with the contemporary version. The pumpkin-coloured, gore and chocolate fest that has come to Britain via the US is gross by comparison; we had a simple version. We dressed up, but in masks and any old clothes we could lay our hands on. We had nuts and apples for bobbing, not chocolate in the shape of severed fingers. We went from house to house looking for a penny for the bobbin’, not trick or treating. And the thing you really looked forward to was barm brack. Halloween was a time for ghosts, not chainsaw massacres It’s actually a fruited, not too sweet yeast loaf, which is really good buttered, and if a bit stale, toasted and buttered.

This month marks the 50th anniversary of the sad death of the actor Dennis Price, star of the classic 1949 black comedy Kind Hearts and Coronets, regarded by many to be the greatest British film of all time. Price was only 58 when he died from cirrhosis of the liver and complications following a broken hip, in a public ward of Guernsey’s main hospital. In the same way his co-star Alec Guinness stole the limelight in Kind Hearts, so the shock break-out of the Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur war did the same on the day of his death. His debts caused him to ‘beat a strategic retreat’ to the Channel Islands where the booze was cheap and the taxman couldn’t bother him Price’s demise may not have been front-page news in 1973 but the sense of loss of all who knew him was great.

For centuries, the English country house has provided the setting for some of the most terrifying fiction in our history. These isolated buildings, with their many empty corridors, secret backstairs, shut-up attic rooms and dark corners, their inherent eeriness has made them iconic settings for chilling encounters. But which real country houses inspired their fictional counterparts? Menabilly House, Cornwall Daphne Du Maurier’s mysterious Manderley was inspired by two country houses. The exterior was based on Menabilly House in Cornwall, an estate which Du Maurier would eventually rent from the Rashleigh family five years after Rebecca’s release, while the interior was inspired by Milton Hall in Cambridgeshire.

In 1979, I was 11 years old, and I had a quite remarkable teacher. Don’t worry, though – this isn’t going to be one of those anodyne paeans to an inspirational educator that the Department for Education use in their ads to lure people into teaching. In fact, if the lady I’ll refer to here as Mrs G were somehow to be reincarnated and placed in front of a Year 6 classroom of today, Ofsted would have her frogmarched out after about 20 minutes.  She once sent me to the local parade of shops to buy a box of Tampax  Mrs G was a fearsome sight – in her late 40s, as broad as she was tall, squeezed into shirt and slacks, with closely shorn curls. I have no photographic evidence, so I’m relying on memory here. She seemed enormous, but then so does everything to a child.

When Cecilia Lisbon, the youngest of the five Lisbon daughters in Sofia Coppola’s film The Virgin Suicides, winds up in the hospital having survived an attempt on her own life, the doctor tells her: ‘You’re not even old enough to know how bad life gets.’ ‘Obviously, doctor,’ Cecilia replies, ‘you’ve never been a 13-year-old girl.’ The dark edge of adolescence runs through Sofia Coppola’s films. You get a sense from even the most playful and romantic scenes that, behind the lustre of expensive clothes or dappled sunlight, girlhood is tragic and that its transformations are traumatic. Coppola’s eye for these contrasts makes her films brilliant.

Becoming proficient in a so-called ‘easy’ language (for English speakers, French is relatively easy) often takes hundreds of hours; a difficult language (Mandarin anyone?) takes several thousand. That’s good for language teachers, but not so good for the learners.  Language teaching today is where medicine was in the 18th century Even after putting in all those hours of following an expensive course, many people never become proficient. How can so much time and effort amount to such little progress? Language learning happens inside the brain, making the processes involved difficult to observe and understand – that’s why language teaching today is where medicine was in the 18th century, and why, all too often, language lessons are associated with failure.

Twenty years ago, the Spanish railway company RENFE stole my girlfriend’s father. There were four of us – my girlfriend, her dad, and a university friend of ours. We had been in Spain for more than a month, walking the Camino de Santiago. Now it was time to head home, first by train to Bilbao and then on to Stansted by air. Once we found our seats on the train, in the rearmost carriage, I settled in for the long haul – the journey is ten hours – with my battered copy of Herodotus, which I was determined to finish before the start of the new academic year. I was soon absorbed in the father of history’s delightful tall tales about, among other things, giant gold-mining ants.

From the outside, it appeared derelict – not an uncommon thing to find when visiting an unknown establishment based solely on a listing in an old copy of ‘The Good Pub Guide’. But a chap walking past with his labrador reassured us: ‘She usually opens at noon.’ When we returned an hour later it was immediately plain that the pub was still in use – you could hear music coming from inside. This turned out to be from a five-piece acoustic string band who were seated by the fire, playing ‘I’ve Just Seen a Face’.

At 1.17 p.m. on 1 February 2019, a daytime bolide exploded over Vinales, Cuba, showering down meteorites on the local villagers. Seasoned meteor hunters flew the stones back to the Tuscon Gem Show in a now-defunct Inn Suites where, from my display room, I watched enviously as they broke the stones apart with a hammer and began to sell them for $100 per gram. The hunters staved off competition by inventing wild stories about how the army had taken over, confiscating the meteorites and jailing hunters trying to take meteorites out of Cuba. But a few days later, a Russian hunting team brought 50kg to the show, selling them at $10 per gram. Soon after that, the locals flooded the market, flying the meteorites from Cuba to Panama to Florida, selling 20kg lots for as cheap as $1 per gram.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes (a third cousin of Ralph, since you ask) has written a book about Lawrence of Arabia. He feels an affinity with him: he too has led Arabs in fighting, in Sir Ranulph’s case, for the Sultan of Oman. ‘I’d been in Arabia, leading Arabs against the Marxist rebels. In Lawrence’s day, the British were fighting the Germans and the Turks’.   ‘It’s my DNA. My ancestors did lots of travel in new places’ The circumstances differed. ‘Lawrence had camels and was dealing with a huge body of men; I had six open-topped Land Rovers with two machine guns and I led 30 men; a mixture of Belushis and Oman Arabs and Zanzibars. I felt about the men as a family.’ What does he make of Lawrence’s extraordinary career? ‘It mystified me’, he says.

Nepo-narcissism has plunged new depths. Scarlett Curtis, the mauve-haired social justice activist and daughter of filmmaker Richard, has been grilling her hapless father about his wicked pre-cultural revolutionary past. During a creepy Soviet-style cross-examination in front of a crowd at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, Scarlett harangued the creator of Blackadder for failing to include a single black person in his film Notting Hill. Rather than telling his daughter to check her thinking – duh, the film came out in 1999, long before it became mandatory to patronise people of colour – Richard made the fatal error of trying to excuse his problematic past.