Aging

My beef with the columnist Bruce Anderson began, as beefs do, at the Spectator summer party. Not this year’s – we will come to that – but at another brilliant edition of the annual gold-plater some years ago. On that occasion, after arrival I’d gone to my usual peg outdoors by the stairs up into the garden, a liminal position from where I can bag the famous and important and am unlikely to be bed-blocked by bores. Bruce, aka ‘Brute Anderson’ – a baggy, shaggy bruiser of whom P.G. Wodehouse would doubtless have written that he looked as though he had been poured into his clothes and had forgotten to say ‘when’ – loomed. ‘Lassie,’ the Scot boomed. I mounted a step to be closer to him in height.

We were driving to the V&A summer party, windows down, scent of jasmine floating on the liquid June air, prospect of petal-strewn cocktails and pretty girls posing in their zaniest dresses with Grayson Perry ahead. My iPhone in my bag connected to Ivo’s car radio and – bear with me – started playing. We were in Kensington Church Street and it was the Radio 4 Media Show. ‘In a minute the head of BBC news on cuts announced today and former World Tonight presenter Ritula Shah on the Radio 4 programmes being axed,’ said Katie Razzall, introducing the acting bean-counter, a Mr Jonathan Munro, who explained that he had to cut 10 per cent costs, that 550 jobs were being binned to save half a billion quid, and that there was much more pain to come.

It would have been my mother’s 84th birthday on 29 May. I thought about her as I clattered down the corkscrew stairs at Holland Park Underground Station, past the prissy sign warning travellers not to attempt the stairs because there were 93 of them, instead of encouraging people to use them as I would if I were in charge around here. On the platform, in the soupy tunnel, I took out my iPhone to play my little game, which is to do the Wordle before the next train arrives, which – thanks to the Central Line’s rapid peristalsis – is usually only a couple of minutes. Mission accomplished, I got onto a standing-room-only carriage. My mother died in 2021, aged 79. It was her time.