Charles Spencer

A few weeks ago, feeling stale and stressed, I escaped to our dilapidated cottage in Dorset for a few days on my own. When I was younger, and especially when I was drinking heavily, I often felt ill at ease in my own company, but these days I get on quite happily alone, though I sometimes worry that I talk to myself too much, and wonder whether I am going slightly mad in my old age. I once read that it’s OK to talk to yourself, but there might be cause for concern if you find that you are answering yourself back. I do that all the time. If I am going mad at least it is a contented kind of dottiness, and walking on the cliffs, eating seafood at the splendid Hive Beach Café in Burton Bradstock and drinking endless cups of PG Tips did me the world of good.

Whisper it ever so quietly, but I think we might just be through the worst that winter has to throw at us. I’m writing this down in Dorset, and though there was a ferocious wind at West Bay, whipping up huge waves that broke spectacularly over the pier, and a peculiarly spiteful heavy shower, precisely angled so that the rain penetrated deep into my left ear as I walked along the prom, it was nothing like as cold as it has been. Better still, the roadside verges in our village of Netherbury are blessed with beautiful clumps of snowdrops, planted by the brilliant local wildlife photographer Colin Varndell and a team of volunteers, which lift the spirits whenever you see them. I no longer feel the need to crawl into bed and hibernate whenever I have any time off.

We are already more than halfway through January and I am still managing to stick heroically to my new year’s resolution. This is to keep smoking throughout 2012 — with a particularly large intake of nicotine and tar planned for the dreaded Olympic Games when everyone will be banging on about the glories of physical fitness. There will be no end of temptations to quit, of course. I was at a wonderful dinner party over the festive period, held, romantically, in a candlelit, lovingly restored vintage railway carriage. When I announced I was going to nip outside for a fag, the hostess looked at me with a mixture of disbelief and horror, as if I had proposed shooting up heroin or molesting a young child.

One of the unwritten rules in our house is that Christmas should never be mentioned until a few days before the big day. Mrs Spencer gets into a state in the run-up to the festive season, not least because, as a teacher at the Royal Ballet School, she has rehearsals of The Nutcracker to attend at Covent Garden, in which the school’s pupils always appear, as well as end-of-term reports to write. When she is in the thick of all this, the idea of writing Christmas cards, buying presents and planning the catering brings on acute anxiety attacks, and if I so much as mention how much I am looking forward to the festivities all hell can break out. But secretly I am looking forward to it, tremendously.

I don’t know about you but I have to steel myself these days to turn on the Today programme in the morning. There is always the terrifying prospect that an infuriatingly overexcited Robert Peston will come on, barely able to contain his glee as he reports that one’s own bank or pension fund has just gone spectacularly bust. And when that dire day comes, as I increasingly fear it will, Peston will doubtless be followed by a sanctimonious government minister who will inform us that we are all going to have to work until we are 80 before we can receive our meagre state pensions. What’s scariest of all, I find, is that when one runs into people who really understand money, they always seem to take the most apocalyptic view of all.

When one thinks of Tim Rice, one doesn’t exactly picture a man who has had a tremendous struggle to make it to the top. When one thinks of Tim Rice, one doesn’t exactly picture a man who has had a tremendous struggle to make it to the top. He met Andrew Lloyd Webber in 1965, wrote several world-conquering hit musicals with him, and later moved on to Disney where he got a slice of the action on Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King, among others. Unlike his former colleague, who has so often appeared driven and troubled, Rice has always given every impression of enjoying life greatly. But it wasn’t always plain sailing as a fascinating CD makes clear.

In ‘Poetry of Departures’, in which Philip Larkin imagines escaping his existence as a librarian for a life of wild daring and adventure, he writes: We all hate home And having to be there; I detest my room, It’s specially-chosen junk, the good books, the good bed. In ‘Poetry of Departures’, in which Philip Larkin imagines escaping his existence as a librarian for a life of wild daring and adventure, he writes: We all hate home And having to be there; I detest my room, It’s specially-chosen junk, the good books, the good bed. And my life, in perfect order. It is, he concludes, ‘reprehensibly perfect’. I wish I could say my life was so well organised.

I was in New York the other week, furtively sneaking into a preview of the doomed new Spider-Man musical, which features music from Bono and The Edge of U2. Just typing the infinitely silly names of those two humour-free and tiresomely bombastic rock stars makes me feel irritated, but not nearly as irritated as the $65-million show itself, with its pretentious and sometimes downright incomprehensible storyline, and a score that contains nothing approaching a decent tune. Spider-Man is one of the biggest fiascos I have endured in more than 30 years of reviewing theatre, and so po-faced that it doesn’t even achieve ‘so-bad-it’s-good’ status.

I have long believed that a part of you dies in winter and doesn’t come back to life until you feel the sun on your face and a mid-westerly breeze in the air. I have long believed that a part of you dies in winter and doesn’t come back to life until you feel the sun on your face and a mid-westerly breeze in the air. We must take comfort where we find it in these dark days and I have recently discovered a splendid pick-me-up that might just get you through the next couple of months with a spring in your step.

Sitting on my desk as I write are two objects of wonder and delight. They are a pair of box sets from the Deutsche Grammophon label celebrating the company’s 111 years of existence. An odd anniversary to celebrate, you might think, and I suspect the real reason is that the marketing men somehow forgot the centenary and are catching up late, with the rather lame excuse that the number 111 ‘enjoys a special kudos in musical circles’ because Op. 111 was Beethoven’s last piano sonata. The first box was released last year, and very quickly sold out. By the time I became aware of it, you could only lay your hands on second-hand copies selling for eye-watering prices. It was such a success, however, that DG has recently reissued it, along with a second collection.