More from life

Last week I put £25 on Lady C to win I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here. At 25/1, I thought it was quite a good bet – until she withdrew for medical reasons. For those not watching the 15th series of the jungle reality show, Lady C is Lady Colin Campbell, a self-proclaimed ‘socialite’ and author of several royal biographies. Some of her fellow contestants, such as ex-Spandau Ballet frontman Tony Hadley, have accused her of not being a ‘real lady’, but they don’t have a clue, obviously. They mean she swears a lot, which hardly disqualifies her from being a toff.

Seeing my ten-year-old daughter, Freya, a week after the massacre in Paris, I asked her if she had heard anything about the events there. She said, in a matter-of-fact kind of way, that she had heard something, but didn’t say what it was or from whom she had heard it. All she would say was that it hadn’t been mentioned by her teachers at school. And then she changed the subject. I didn’t feel like saying any more on the matter. Either she didn’t know anything much or she didn’t want to talk about it. And what would have been the point of discussing something so horrible with her? We turned on the television and watched an old Bing Crosby movie instead. But one of the hot topics of recent days has been what to tell children about this Isis atrocity.

This is hardly the time of year for picnics on the lawn, but I have nevertheless had a week dominated by Glyndebourne. First I went to London to see David Hare’s play The Moderate Soprano, about the creation of the Glyndebourne opera festival by John Christie in 1934; and then to a Glyndebourne production in Milton Keynes of Mozart’s opera Die Entführung aus dem Serail. John Christie was an extraordinary man. A rich country landowner, who served bravely in the first world war, he returned home to his house in Sussex to pursue his interest in music. He purchased a colossal organ, perhaps the biggest in England outside a cathedral. He put on little opera performances in the organ room.

It is hardly uncommon for politicians to lie, especially when their careers are threatened by a sexual transgression — John Profumo about Christine Keeler, for example, and Bill Clinton on not having had ‘sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky’. But there is a particular kind of distortion of the truth that is rare over here but almost routine among American presidential candidates; and this is the way they embellish their personal histories to maximise their appeal to voters.

The last time I was in New Orleans was during the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico when the city was still also reeling from the effects of Hurricane Katrina. Now it seems to have recovered from these traumas. The restaurants are packed and the picturesque French Quarter, the old heart of the city, throbs to the sound of jazz music in streets blazing with neon lights and crowded with excited fun-seekers. But things are hardly perfect. The city has one of the highest crime rates in America — well over 100 murders already this year — and even in the Garden District, the city’s most expensive area, full of gracious Victorian villas, the pavements are in such disrepair that they are perilous to walk on.

The Metropolitan Club in Washington is so close to the White House that President Obama chose to walk there for lunch on Tuesday through Lafayette Park while his motorcade followed behind. The lunch was described in the media as ‘secret’, and American reporters were frustrated by the refusal of the White House and the club’s staff to divulge anything whatsoever about it. But nothing the President does is really secret, and his visit was certainly not secret to me, since I was staying in the club at the time under a reciprocal arrangement between the Metropolitan and the Garrick in London, of which I’m a member.

As I grow older, I find myself increasingly reluctant to travel, which is why it’s been a few years now since I last visited New York. I like New York, but there are few nastier experiences than going there. The usual horrors associated with modern air travel are bad enough, but the passengers on transatlantic flights tend to be especially uncongenial — harassed mothers with screaming babies, tattooed, pot-bellied men bursting out of their jeans. By the time I reached the check-in desk at Gatwick Airport I had become so alarmed at the thought that I might be put next to one of the scarily obese women who’d been in front of me in the queue that I paid for an exorbitantly expensive upgrade to a ‘premium’ seat.

I was both delighted and unsurprised that Denis Healey made it to 98. One day in the 1970s I took him to lunch at L’Epicure. As he encouraged the waiter to pile his plate higher and higher from the hors-d’oeuvre trolley, my astonishment must have been plain because he grinned and declared: ‘Don’t worry about me — both my parents lived into their nineties.’ Another time, Mrs Oakley and I were in a dusty square in Collioure in south-west France when music began blaring from a loudspeaker to advertise a nearby circus.

It has taken years, but finally England has joined the rest of the United Kingdom and other countries around the world in declaring war on the plastic carrier bag. This week for the first time English supermarkets are being forbidden by law to give plastic bags away for free. From now on they will have to charge 5p for every one of them. It is the beginning of the end. The plastic bag is heading for oblivion. The most useful shopping tool of the last half-century will soon, I imagine, be extinct. It seems only appropriate at this point to say how wonderful plastic bags have been. They are the most useful carriers ever invented — strong, light, capacious and absurdly cheap to produce. Life without them will never be so easy again.