Alexander Waugh

Friday

Alexander Waugh

Diary – 3 June 2005

Am I losing my puissance or has something gone disastrously awry with the nation’s young women? It used to be at this time of year — just as the sun started to shine and the first green blob of plum showed itself upon the twig — that they put away their shapeless cold-weather clothes in preference for a lighter, better fitting and more colourful summer garb. For that reason, how happy this time of year always used to be. But alas, no longer — not in the West Country at any rate. Down here the new fashion is to look as sickly and repulsive as possible. The teenage girls of Taunton have taken to dyeing their hair black at the edges with a heavy matt-white crest on top.

Saturday

Alexander Waugh

To battle with Sir Baldwin

With a little genealogical effort over three million people in this country can trace their ancestry back to a 15th- century hero called Sir Baldwin Fulford, and his luscious wife, Elizabeth Bozom, daughter of Sir John Bozom of Bozom-zeal. According to our old books of blazons Sir Baldwin was ‘a great soldier and a traveller of so undaunted resolution that for the honour and liberty of a royal lady he fought a combat with a Saracen (for bulk and bigness an unequal match) whom yet he vanquished’. In 1461 he was executed at Bristol, but Sir Baldwin’s spirit lives on, a little in all of us, and a great deal in his male heir representative of the 17th generation, the baggy landed gent and TV personality, Francis ‘Fucker’ Fulford.