More from life

The appointment of Sajid Javid as the new Secretary of State for Culture has been much criticised on the grounds that culture is not his forte; and in an interview with the Times the other day he confessed that he had never been to the opera. This is a little surprising because, as a former banker in the City earning an estimated £3 million a year, he is just the kind of person you might expect to go to the Royal Opera House if only to flaunt his wealth. However, Javid has never seen an opera; and the reasons he gave for this in his interview were that when he was young he was too poor, and that once he had become rich there was ‘not much time outside work’. Not much time outside work?

When I got married 50 years ago, my wife and I had somehow acquired a little cookery book called Cooking in Ten Minutes. We never quite managed to cook anything in so short a time, mainly, I think, because the book was a bit of a cheat: it seemed to expect you to have a saucepan full of boiling water and a whole lot of washed and prepared vegetables ready before the ten minutes began. We lost the book long ago, but 40 years afterwards I read a volume of essays by Julian Barnes, The Pedant in the Kitchen, in which he devoted an entire chapter to French Cooking in Ten Minutes and to its author, Edouard de Pomiane, who, he informed me, had been a food scientist and dietician much admired by Elizabeth David.

We all have to adjust to reality, like the lady who entered a Barbados bar having already enjoyed several gin and Dubonnets. On her shoulder was perched a rare parrot and she announced, ‘The first person to guess what this bird is can go to bed with me tonight.’ A voice calls out: ‘A turkey.’ After a quick survey of the other bar stools she replied: ‘That’s near enough.’ Under the leadership of the British Horseracing Authority chief Paul Bittar, racing too has been adjusting to reality, most notably in working for a better relationship with the betting industry on whom it must continue to rely for funding.

There was something poignant about the decision of L’Wren Scott, Mick Jagger’s American girlfriend, who committed suicide in New York last month, to leave everything she had to him in her will. Maybe it was out of gratitude for his help in keeping her foundering fashion business afloat; or maybe it was just a mark of her devotion to the man she referred to in the will as ‘my Michael Philip Jagger’. But whatever her motive, it was a decision very much against the spirit of the times, one that will further widen the gap between rich and poor by adding property worth £5.5 million to Jagger’s already estimated personal fortune of around £200 million. He is hardly the most needy recipient of such largesse.

More than 20 years ago, when I was living in New York, I wrote an article about the mutilation by the United States government of a fine old piano on the pretext of saving the African elephant. The piano was a 1920 concert grand from the once famous Parisian house of Érard, from which came the favourite piano of Franz Liszt. It had been bought in Paris by the Israeli–American pianist Ophra Yerushalmi, a huge admirer of the Hungarian virtuoso, and flown by her at great expense to New York, where it had been seized by the US Fish and Wildlife Service on the grounds that it had ivory-coated keys. Well, of course, until recently all piano keys had ivory on them, and this particular piano was then 73 years old.

Waitrose in Towcester has closed down for a week to make what it describes as ‘a final few touches’ to an ‘exciting’ refurbishment. We will see just how exciting this is when the store reopens this weekend with its ‘improved customer toilets’, ‘improved café’, and so on. But forgive me for being a little sceptical, for normally the main effect of a supermarket ‘refurbishment’ is to disorient shoppers. Managements wait until customers such as myself have finally mastered the layout of the store and know where to find everything they need (something that can take a long time to achieve) and then suddenly they move everything around again.

My house in south Northamptonshire looks out over parkland on which Henry VIII used to hunt deer with Anne Boleyn. The only deer on it nowadays are the unhunted muntjacs, charmless little creatures that only arrived in England from Asia 400 years later; but there still are plenty of foxes, which carry out periodic massacres of my chickens. I am in the country of the famous Grafton hunt, but the hunt, alas, never ventures into my area because of the busy roads that surround it. The Grafton is still, however, extremely active elsewhere in the county and thrives just as much as it did before Parliament’s ban on hunting with hounds came into effect nine years ago.

Shortly after Bob Crow’s death was announced on Tuesday, Nigel Farage sent the following tweet: ‘Sad at the death of Bob Crow. I liked him and he also realised working-class people were having their chances damaged by the EU.’ Cue a predictable storm of Twitter outrage. Farage was attacked for trying to make political capital out of Crow’s death. The following tweet, from the ex-FT journalist Ben Fenton, was typical: ‘Bit off-key for @Nigel_Farage to link a tribute to Bob Crow to his own anti-EU rhetoric, I think.’ Now, some of those criticising Farage had a political axe to grind. They were claiming Farage had broken an unwritten rule that they clearly don’t believe in themselves.