Alexander Chancellor

The days may be long gone when a husband would pretend to commit adultery in a Brighton hotel so as to clear his wife, whatever her faults, of any blame for a divorce. But might it not still be customary for him at least to present their separation as mutually and amicably agreed? Not so, apparently. For such gallantry has been strikingly absent from the three most publicised divorce suits of the summer, in which rich and powerful men have each acted unilaterally and without much regard to their spouses’ dignity. A month ago, Vladimir Putin appeared on Russian television with his wife, Lyudmila, to announce that their 30-year marriage was over.

The Martello Towers — that chain of 103 little fortresses built in the early 1800s along the south and east costs of England to repel a feared Napoleonic invasion — were condemned by William Cobbett at the time as a huge waste of public money; and so they turned out to be, for the British victories at Trafalgar and Waterloo ensured that Napoleon would never invade. And in fact, during the 200 years of their existence, no gun has ever been fired from any of them, with the one exception of the Martello Tower at Aldeburgh in Suffolk, the northernmost of them all, which was used by anti-aircraft gunners during the second world war.

My collection of poultry here in Northamptonshire (consisting at present of six ducks and eight hens) includes two little chattering call ducks named Boris and Marina. I called the drake Boris after the Mayor of London, and its partner Marina after the Mayor’s wife. The poultryman who sold them to me said that call ducks were so devoted to each other that if one of them died the other would inevitably die soon afterwards. So I became concerned a few weeks ago when Marina disappeared, and Boris was left swimming around without her on my garden pond. But he didn’t seem nearly as disconsolate as I would have expected (in fact, he didn’t seem disconsolate at all), and after a few days it was clear why. For Marina had neither died nor deserted him.

Great wealth has always bred envy and resentment among the rest of us, which is why even in ancient times people liked to believe that it would be its possessors’ undoing. Thus one of the myths about King Midas of Phrygia was that, having sought and been granted the gift of turning everything he touched to gold, he died of starvation because his food underwent the same metamorphosis. Legend also had it that King Croesus of Lydia, still to this day a byword for unimaginable riches, lost his kingdom to the Persians, who then burnt him to death. Sadly, such myths tend to be untrue, just inventions of the poor to raise their spirits. For on the whole the very rich are perfectly happy and lead fuller, longer lives than everyone else.

My irritability grows with age and tends to attach itself to things that surprise even me — for example, to the widely popular sight of people riding horses on country roads. The smug, self-righteous look on their faces makes my blood simmer dangerously. And another thing that particularly grates with me at the moment is the ubiquitous use of the expression ‘no problem’. Until recently the normal response to a ‘thank you’ would be ‘that’s quite all right’ or ‘my pleasure’ or maybe even, in the American manner, ‘you’re welcome’. But now, in Northamptonshire at any rate, it is always ‘no problem’; and while this is presumably meant to be polite, it comes across to me as offensive.

When I was a child there was never any doubt that I would go to a boarding school. My father, my uncle and my elder brother had all gone to Eton, and it was assumed that I would eventually go there, too; but I would first be expected to board at a preparatory school with a good record for getting its pupils into that famous establishment. And so it was that from the age of 8 to 18 I spent more than half of every year away from home, living in communities of other boys in the care not of parents but of schoolmasters. My two sisters went to boarding schools, too, just as our mother had before them, and it didn’t seem to matter whether or not we children were happy boarders; boarding school was our inevitable fate, and nobody questioned that it was the best thing for us.

My mother’s father, Sir Richard Paget Bt, was not just an old-fashioned Somerset landowner but also an amateur scientist, artist and musician of boundless energy and curiosity, whose achievements included the writing of a book on the origins of human speech, the invention of a sign language for the deaf, the hand-crafting of musical instruments, and the composing and publication of various long-forgotten songs. And he was always propounding bizarre theories that he liked to test by using his children as guinea pigs, however hazardous this might be for them.

I sometimes think that, by the time I die, my entire life will have been blighted by sterile, unresolved arguments about Europe. I have to admit that the foundation of the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 made little impression on me at the time; but I was only 11 years old, Britain wasn’t involved in it, and I had no idea in any case what it was all about. It was, of course, the precursor to the European Economic Community, created in 1957 by the Treaty of Rome; but by then I was 17 and thought it sounded a very good idea, for its main purpose appeared to be to prevent for ever the recurrence of a European war.

I am on my first ever visit to Sweden and enjoying it greatly. My idea of this country had recently become rather confused. I used to picture it as a social democratic paradise, a tolerant, law-abiding welfare state in which everyone was a good and caring citizen. But then came the Wallander television series and the Stieg Larsson books and films in which Sweden was portrayed as a country in which violent crime was rife and corruption, sadism and perversion held sway. The reality, as I have experienced it over the past few days, has neither upheld nor discredited either of these stereotypes.

The long, intermittent debate about whether parents should be allowed to spank their children has erupted once again with the finding by an American research team that it doesn’t do children any harm provided it is tempered by love. Whether it does them any good is another matter, and it’s not really the point; for in this country it is the right of parents to spank children if they feel like it, and not the consequences for the children themselves, that has always been the main issue.

One of the sculptures at the British Museum’s splendid Pompeii exhibition shows four ferocious dogs attacking a stag as it awaits its bloody death with quiet resignation. It is a beautiful work of art, brilliantly carved from a single slab of marble, but potentially shocking today because it appears to rejoice at the prospect of the stag being torn to pieces. The museum clearly fears so, for the label beside the sculpture anticipates objections to it by explaining that the ancient Romans, unlike us, were very keen on bloodsports. This enthusiasm, together with an obsession with erect penises, is one of the few ways in which the Romans were not our superiors in delicacy and refinement.

Just a year ago on this page I was writing about Pope Benedict XVI’s elder brother Georg and how, while ostensibly discreet and loyal to his celebrated sibling, he contrived at the same time to make him look too old and bumbling for the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church. In a book, My Brother, the Pope, this old priest from Bavaria said that his younger brother had never wanted the job, was too physically frail for it, and found it a tremendous strain. Georg Ratzinger must now be feeling somewhat vindicated, but at the time he was ‘off message’, for the Vatican was insistent that the pope was on excellent form. People in high office whose authority demands dignity are often embarrassed by their siblings, as several American presidents have found.

If you have nothing to do, are suffering from stress, and wish to be rendered comatose, I recommend that you get interested in the efforts being made by Edinburgh Zoo to mate its two giant pandas. The zoo has thoughtfully installed video cameras in the pandas’ enclosure so that we can constantly watch them online and marvel at their sloth. I had my laptop tuned to the ‘Panda Cam’ throughout the weekend and checked it from time to time to see what the pandas were up to. The answer was never anything at all except for sleeping or eating.