Any other business

I am disquietingly conscious of feeling smaller than I was; relatively, that is. For most of my life, being six foot one, I have loomed over the majority of men and almost all women. Now, at the local Sainsbury’s, where queues are constant as they are too mean to employ enough staff, I find I am often out-topped by young fellow-queuers, sometimes even by girls. Many of the young men are enormous, six-and-a-half, even seven feet. Female six-footers stride along the pavements, elbowing elderly dwarves out of the way. When I was a young man living in Paris, one of my girlfriends was a six-footer, an American called Euphemia, whom the goggling French thought a gratte-ciel. But that was most unusual. My French girls tended to be around five foot two or three.

Studying, the other day, Nicholas Hilliard’s exquisite miniature ‘Young Man Among Roses’, I decided that it epitomised everything that was most delicious about Elizabethan England. Who, I wondered, gave it to the Victoria & Albert Museum, where the young man now stands in his briery bower? I discovered it was an Australian collector called George Salting (1835–1909), a dim figure who led an obscure life and then left Britain the biggest single series of art donations in her history, remarkable not just for its quantity but for its superlative quality. The kind of person who amasses great collections often amazes me, and leads me to conclude that taste in art has nothing to do with either moral fibre or brainpower.

The Rosewall affair signifies everything that is wrong with Royal Mail. The two-and-a-half ton Rosewall sculpture by Dame Barbara Hepworth was acquired by the Ministry of Works and the Post Office in 1963 for a new Post Office Pension Fund building in Chesterfield, where it became a landmark — until last October, when it took a trip to the Bonhams saleroom in London. Royal Mail announced that Rosewall was no longer part of its ‘cultural heritage’, which of course had nothing to do with the £620,000 it was expected to raise at auction. But after much protest it was withdrawn from sale and repatriated to Chesterfield, presumably along with a very large haulage bill.

Many of my friends were hooked on the latest series of The Apprentice Many of my friends were hooked on the latest series of The Apprentice — even our usually infallible television critic James Delingpole, who told me that he loved it ‘because it’s so awful’. Perhaps I should make more effort to master postmodern irony, but I’m afraid I found Sir Alan Sugar and his contestants just too irritating to watch for more than five minutes at a time.

Wandering through the Vale of Taunton recently, I reflected that few places on earth could be more fair in April-time. The trees were still mostly bare but the blossom was out in many places, and the entire countryside bore an air of expectation and awakening in the pale, tentative sunlight. The carpet of arable, pasture and woodland leans upward from the valley bottom into the Brendon and Blackdown hills, with the Quantocks to the north-east. Not much has changed here in 100 years or indeed 200. The landscape is a magical blend of man’s making and pure nature. Here is farming and nothing else: no industry, few roads of any consequence, a single railway line resurrected from the Beeching massacre of half a century ago, its trains whistling mournfully from time to time.

It is a curious fact, well attested by history, that a downright ugly man need never despair of attracting women, even pretty ones. The recent uproar over John Prescott and his mistress is a good example. Of course this may have been a case of power acting as an aphrodisiac. Henry Kissinger, a keen student of such matters, has always insisted that power, or even mere office, is a sexual magnet. I recall him leaning across a dinner table, at a time when the antics of the late Alan Clark were in the headlines, and seeking from me an explanation of Clark’s success. He was particularly struck by the conquest of what Clark called ‘the Coven’ — the wife of a South African judge and their two daughters (a third wasn’t interested).