Alexander Chancellor

It’s 15 years since I first wrote an article about the threat to the nation of the wild boar; but only now, following the death of a driver in a collision with one of these fearsome beasts on the M4 in Wiltshire, is anyone taking any notice (and not very much notice at that). The government is planning to introduce the same kind of road warning signs for wild boar as those that already exist for deer, horses, toads and ducks. ‘Road safety in the context of wild boars is an emerging issue that needs to be addressed,’ says roads minister John Hayes. ‘The addition of a warning sign for wild boar in areas with populations of the animals would be a sensible step to encourage people to slow down and watch out.’ It is certainly a good idea to watch out.

For the past two and a half years my brother John has been living next door to me in the Northamptonshire countryside. We have both been most of the time alone in our separate houses, 25 yards apart, and, whenever I’ve been there, I have shared at least one meal a day with him. It was a very cosy and mutually supportive set-up. Then, on New Year’s Eve, he suddenly died. His death wasn’t exactly premature — he was 87 and increasingly debilitated by Parkinson’s disease — but it came as a shock nevertheless. On the two last evenings of his life he had come over to my house to have supper and watch his daughter Anna star with Miranda Richardson in the three-part television adaptation of E.F. Benson’s Mapp and Lucia.

I’ve had various ailments during my first 74 years — the worst being those induced by smoking, such as emphysema and chronic bronchitis — but never before have I suffered from back pain. I know many people who have, and I have witnessed the miseries they have suffered — their months spent lying on the floor, their desperate search for suitable treatments, their failed operations. I had begun to think that I might be immune to this particular affliction, attributing this to the fact that I have rather a short back.

More than ever this year I find friends planning to go abroad for Christmas, some to countries such as India where the sun shines and Christmas is barely celebrated at all. I can see why. The goodwill and good cheer that the festival is intended to foster is all too often outweighed by the stress and anxiety it causes. This has been the case for years, but it gets worse with the passage of time. More couples divorce, more families break up, and Christmas tends not to heal such wounds but to aggravate them. The preparations for Christmas are more than joyless; they are soul-destroying. Try visiting Oxford Street at this time of year; or rather, don’t. There is frenzy in the air, and it can’t be attributed to philanthropy.

This is a tremendous time for ‘ordinary’ people. The elitists, the members of the ‘establishment’, are all on the run. Except, of course, that everybody is ordinary now. Or at least nobody admits to being an insider, a member of the Westminster bubble, of the establishment, or of any such posh outfit. There is no ‘them’, only ‘us’, united in conflict with an arrogant, out-of-touch, privileged class that doesn’t apparently exist. Those who don’t recognise their ordinariness, but persist in believing in their superiority, are instantly cut down.

The Times has given way to the Daily Telegraph as the bastion of the established order, for— with the one exception of the Prince of Wales and his wife — it listed the thousand or so people who attended last week’s memorial service for Lady Soames in Westminster Abbey in alphabetical order. This meant, for example, that my name, since it begins with C, came hundreds of places ahead of all the members of the Soames family, and even further ahead of the eighth Duke of Wellington, who is to be 100 years old next July.

I thought that this week I might write about memory loss, but couldn’t remember if I’d written about it last week. Then I remembered that I had written about it, not in The Spectator but in the current issue of the Oldie magazine of which, if I remember correctly, I am the editor. I wrote there about my fear of being exposed by my doctor as mentally deficient in return for the £55 that David Cameron proposes to pay doctors every time they find signs of dementia in any of their patients. So I won’t go on about that again, but will instead celebrate the 20th anniversary of the National Lottery, which I have always hoped might come to the rescue if senility were ever to set in.

On 21 October Ben Bradlee, the famous ex-editor of the Washington Post, died, aged 93. The day before that, on 20 October, Monica Lewinsky, 41, the even more famous ex-girlfriend of Bill Clinton, made her first public speech after ten years spent keeping out of the public eye. They had nothing in common except for the fact that each had been responsible for bringing disgrace to a president of the United States. Richard Nixon would have faced impeachment by Congress over the Watergate scandal, which the Post exposed, if he had not first resigned in 1974 (the first president ever to do so) and then been pardoned by his successor, Gerald Ford. President Clinton was impeached in 1998, but acquitted by the US Senate.

I always dread Hallowe’en. It may have originated in Europe as a Christian celebration for remembering the virtuous dead and wishing them on their way to heaven, but its origins have been long forgotten. Now, more even than Christmas, it is a secular festival sustained by commercial greed. In its modern form, it is an American import, its main inspirations being Count Dracula and horror movies (and perhaps now also Harry Potter). Hallowe’en is a time for the exploitation of children’s love of ghouls and magic and dressing up. Long before the day arrives, the supermarket shelves are stacked with pumpkins carved with the grimacing features of Jack-o’-lanterns, once meant to frighten away evil spirits, and with black witch’s costumes of cheap polyester fabric.

Perhaps it is because newspapers are going through such hard times that they fill their pages with items that cost them almost nothing to report: in particular, they show ever increasing reliance on futile pieces of research carried out by often obscure academics in any corner of the globe. These people are greedy for publicity of any kind and our newspapers are only too eager to oblige. The subjects investigated include such things as the supposed effects of drinking too much or too little, or of taking too much or too little physical exercise; and they are frequently contradictory in their conclusions.

I don’t think I can remember a time when there have been so many scares about. They come at us from every direction, and even sometimes from out of the blue, with names we’ve never heard before. Take Isis, for example, or maybe Isil (there’s not even now a consensus on what to call it). Yet neither name was known to any normal, newspaper-reading person until it was already in control of half the Middle East and beheading western hostages at will. Now the Prime Minister says that we must bomb the Islamic State in Iraq because it threatens our security at home. How can such a powerful and terrifying organisation appear on the scene so suddenly and without warning?

When some years ago I stopped having to go to an office, mainly because nobody wanted me to go to one, I started to do quite a lot of cooking. I am no natural cook, but I had ambitions. I bought more and more cookery books — Jane Grigson, Elizabeth David, Nigella Lawson, Jamie Oliver, that kind of thing — far more than I was ever going to consult.

It’s unusual for somebody promoting his own television programme to tell you not to watch it, but that’s what Evan Davis has been doing. At least, he has asked us not to watch Newsnight during his first week as its chief presenter — the week that is now drawing to its close — because it probably wouldn’t be any good until he’d had a bit more experience. And even then it might turn out to be no good, he’s said: we probably would know by Christmas if it was a disaster. As it happens, I am writing this just before his first appearance on the late-night news programme, but I wonder whether he will have cried on air. In interviews, he has talked a lot about his crying. ‘I cry a lot. All the time,’ he told the Times.

Winslow Hall is a large and handsome country house in Buckinghamshire, built in 1700 by Sir Christopher Wren, which Tony Blair nearly bought in 2007 when he was looking for an imposing residence appropriate to his station in life as a retired prime minister.  The people of Winslow, the small town near Buckingham in which it stands, were understandably alarmed by the prospect of having the Blair family in their midst; but fortunately for them, Tony eventually decided not to buy the house, possibly because its unusual location on a street in the town would have made security a problem.

Sometimes I say I’m Scottish, a claim often greeted with understandable derision. I was born in England, in Hertfordshire, went to school and university in England and, apart from some spells abroad as a journalist, have always lived and worked in England. I don’t even have much Scottish blood. My mother was English, from the West Country, and three of my four grandparents were English too. I have no trace of a Scottish accent. I don’t even know Scotland very well. I have never had a home there and have never lived there. As far as Alex Salmond is concerned, I might as well be Lithuanian. And yet, Scotland is very much part of me. Though it may not sound like it, the name Chancellor is Scottish.

Of the nine chickens I used to keep here in Northamptonshire only one survived the summer, and it was the least appealing of them — broody, squawky, aggressive, and a bad layer. The others were all taken, one by one, by foxes. Unfond though I am of the only survivor, a black Sussex hen, she has at least enabled me to cling on to my position as a keeper of poultry, however little of it, and I have now bought a white Sussex hen to keep her company. But I am keeping them cooped up all the time — something I promised I would never do — until I can find some way of protecting free-range chickens from their vulpine predators. As I have written before, I have received a lot of advice from readers about how best to do this.

I have been, on and off, a lifelong smoker; but I gave up in January 2009 on the day of Barack Obama’s inauguration as President of the United States. It was out of feelings of solidarity with the poor man, who I assumed (incorrectly, as it turned out) would have to quit too when he took office; for Hillary Clinton, as First Lady, had ruled that there should never be any smoking in the White House. I myself remained primly smoke-free for five and a half years, but took up cigarettes again in June when I became editor of The Oldie. Before that I had edited four other magazines, including this one, and had always had a cigarette on the go for most of the time. I think I couldn’t imagine editing anything without one.

Back from holiday in Italy, I look out of my kitchen window in Northamptonshire to find the country view blocked by an enormous marquee with red pennants flying from the top. People are bustling about, carrying boxes of cutlery, glasses and china. I suddenly remember that there is to be a wedding reception here tomorrow. I let people hold such receptions to help pay for the maintenance of two crumbling Inigo Jones pavilions, the surviving appendages of a 17th-century country house that was destroyed by fire in the 1880s. I charge for these events, but this is but a tiny proportion of the cost of the receptions for the couples concerned. They typically have sit-down suppers for over 100 people, and many more guests afterwards to dance till midnight to deafening rock music.

As the holidays draw to a close, Italian newspapers have been reporting with perplexity and distaste on the outlandish behaviour of foreign tourists in Italy, by which they mean young people from northern European countries. One report told of a couple making love in broad daylight on a bridge over the Grand Canal in Venice, the Ponte degli Scalzi (which, as a commentator pointed out, means ‘Bridge of the Barefooted’, not ‘Bridge of the Bare-bottomed’). Other reports talked of people sunbathing naked in public places or picnicking in large groups under the colonnades in St Mark’s Square. Venice suffered most from these excesses, but nowhere was immune.