Charles Spencer

One of Van Morrison’s umpteen albums is called What’s Wrong with this Picture? It’s a question long-term fans are likely to echo as they contemplate the cover of his new release, Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl. One of Van Morrison’s umpteen albums is called What’s Wrong with this Picture? It’s a question long-term fans are likely to echo as they contemplate the cover of his new release, Astral Weeks Live at the Hollywood Bowl. What’s wrong is that Van Morrison is smiling. This is, to say the least, unusual. Morrison is the most famous curmudgeon in popular music and he doesn’t do smiles. He prefers to appear on his record sleeves looking moody, depressed or downright aggressive.

I had a letter from my friend Leo the other day, one of the most interesting men I have ever met. The son of a navvy and a cleaner, he won an exhibition to Balliol to read English and when he arrived in Oxford his Geordie accent was so strong that he was often incomprehensible to mollycoddled posh kids from the south like me. At that stage, Leo was determined to become a bullfighter, and I will never forget the astonished horror on my Anglo-Saxon tutor’s face when Leo announced that he had been unable to write an essay on ‘The Seafarer’ that week because he had been talking on the local radio station about his ambition. Sadly he never became a matador, and after graduating he bummed happily around for many years, earning a crust as a life-class model.

We have a super-efficient friend who has all her Christmas shopping both purchased and wrapped by the end of the summer holidays. It drives Mrs Spencer — who regards the approach of Christmas with the panic-stricken horror of a hedgehog who spots an oncoming truck — almost mad with jealous rage. In an attempt to calm her down, I always say that we should just buy each other a small token (chocolate peppermint creams for her, Australian soft-eating liquorice for me), so she has one thing less to worry about as she does the rounds for her relatives, friends and colleagues.

I had what reformed alkies call a moment of clarity last week. On one of my regular trawls through the Amazon website, I clicked the One-day 1-Click button and ordered the first CD in what I felt in my guts was going to be an expensive and enjoyable binge. But instead of the usual response thanking me for my order there was a problem. My credit card had expired. All I had to do, however, was enter the details of the new one, already activated, signed and tucked away in my wallet, and we could immediately get back to business as usual. Instead I decided enough was enough and let my account lapse.  About six months ago I bought a new shelving unit that comfortably holds 200 CDs. It is already almost full.

This is a time for making the most of small mercies. One of the greatest of these, as the financial system collapses around us, is the splendid joke that is Robert Peston of the BBC. His extraordinarily camp, over-emphatic delivery would be perfect for reporting glitzy Broadway first nights but seems hilariously at odds with worldwide economic catastrophe. Peston has all the glee of the callow cub reporter rejoicing in the size of his scoop while lacking the imagination to understand the anxiety his excitable tales of doom-and-gloom might be causing others. Like poor Mr and Mrs Spencer of Claygate, Surrey, for instance, who somehow managed to commit themselves to £40,000 worth of home improvements (double glazing and a new kitchen) just before the current crisis went big time.

Although I waste a lot of time these days gazing longingly at advertisements for luxury cruises in the Daily Telegraph, I don’t think I could ever leave England for good. Although I waste a lot of time these days gazing longingly at advertisements for luxury cruises in the Daily Telegraph, I don’t think I could ever leave England for good. A three-month cruise chasing the sun would be as long as I could bear to be away from home, and only then if I could take the cat Nelson with me as a cabin companion. But if anything ever does drive me into exile, it will be the irksome British habit of bossiness that seems to have become so much worse under the present government.

Mrs Spencer and I are just back from a few days in Tuscany where I was bullied into as punishing a round of culture-vulturing as I have ever endured. The temperature may have been just a degree or two short of 100°F in Florence, but a small matter like heat exhaustion wasn’t going to stop the missus in her tracks. Give her a guidebook, and she becomes a woman obsessed. We were up at dawn to queue for the Uffizi, outside the doors of the Medici chapel before they opened at 8.15 a.m. And in fact, though I grumbled, I must admit I enjoyed it almost as much as she did. After spending long days looking at great art and great architecture, you might have thought the spirit would crave the most beautiful classical music in the evening.

My body aches, my bones creak and I have a nagging headache that paracetamol won’t shift. It’s a bit like having a hangover again, but mercifully without the attendant guilt. As I write, my son Ed, his friend Ollie and I have just spent the weekend at Guilfest, accurately and succinctly billed in the Daily Telegraph’s bumper festival preview a few weeks ago as ‘An unlikely success. Not bothered with cool, thus unpretentious fun.’ What I like best about this festival, held each year in Stoke Park on the outskirts of prosperous Guildford, is that it’s just 20 minutes down the A3 from our house and has plenty of parking. This means that I don’t have to sleep under canvas and can come back home each night to the comforts of my own bed and bathroom.

There are artists you admire and there are artists you love, and for me Bob Dylan has long fallen into the former category. I have been listening to him, sporadically, since I was a schoolboy, when his rebellious stance and imagistic, freewheeling lyrics had an obvious appeal to a bolshie adolescent at a boy’s boarding school who fancied himself as a poet. But while I can appreciate that such albums as Blonde on Blonde, Highway 61 Revisited and Blood on the Tracks are compelling and lyrically profound, it would be dishonest to pretend that I listen to them often. Looking at my shelves I’m astonished to discover that I own 16 of Dylan’s individual albums and no fewer than six best of/essential/greatest hits collections.

I’m writing this on the May Day bank holiday, with birds singing outside, probably in terror as the cat Nelson is on the prowl, searching for some luckless fledgling to kill and devour on our doorstep. He will then roll on his back, wave his legs in the air and look cute, expecting to be congratulated on his brutality. Tennyson knew what he was about when he wrote of nature red in tooth and claw. Serial killing aside, it has been the most beautiful of springs. You’ll probably riposte that it has been mostly wet and cold but that’s my point. The weather seems to have slowed down spring. Most years the season seems to pass in a flash, before you have properly appreciated it. This year it has taken its time. The primroses in the lanes of Dorset lasted for many weeks.

It is three years since I last wrote about my iPod. When I first bought the blighter, my then 12-year-old son warned me that it would prove a disaster and he was absolutely right. Unable to cope with the technology required to load the thing I enlisted the help of my nephew, Tom, who agreed to transfer my favourite CDs for 50 pence a time. By the end I had some 2,000 tracks on a machine the size of a cigarette packet. I was a little frustrated because it was capable of holding 10,000 tunes, and poor Tom’s computer had given up the ghost, but how I enjoyed putting on those smart white earphones on my rail journeys to London and choosing whether to listen to the Stones, the Grateful Dead or classic soul. Days after writing my column, however, the bloody iPod got jammed.

Mrs Spencer had to spend five days in Paris during half-term observing ballet classes, so my son Edward and I tagged along too, on the strict understanding that watching dance lessons was absolutely not on the agenda as far as we were concerned. It came as a jolt to realise that my first visit to Paris had been 45 years earlier when my parents took me there at the age of eight. I can’t remember much about it except the pungent smells from the drains, buying a much loved penknife and the evening when my mother was taken ill in a restaurant while tackling a particularly glutinous bowl of onion soup that trailed yards of elastic cheese.

‘I think continually of those who were truly great,’ wrote Stephen Spender, which must have been awkward when he was trying to read a map, cook the lunch, or write that bloody awful poem about pylons. But I, too, have been thinking, if not continually, then at least often, about two great men, both dead, both much missed. They couldn’t have been more different, but they both played a major part in forming my attitudes, my taste and perhaps even my character. Philip Balkwill was my English teacher at Charterhouse, and I was reminded of him early in January when I went to re-review Alan Bennett’s The History Boys at Wyndham’s Theatre.

I went out on the razzle with a bunch of reformed drunks last weekend. God, it was fun. The aim was a serious walk, eleven and a half miles, kicking off from Eastbourne, walking over Beachy Head and the Seven Sisters, before doing a sharp right for the final slog to the village of Alfriston and supper. As I motored down to Eastbourne, listening to dear old Brian Matthew’s delightful Sounds of the Sixties on Radio Two, the sun was shining, the sky was an eggshell blue, God was in his heaven and all was right with the world. We met up at Eastbourne station, eight of us in all, though one was a driver ready to rescue anyone incapable of finishing the route. As it turned out, this proved to be everyone.

Is there a more irritating figure in British public life than Richard Branson? The beard, the cuddly sweaters, the toothy grin, the self-advertisement, the torments of the damned involved in travelling on one of his trains or planes. No news story in recent weeks has cheered me up as much as the one about Branson injuring himself while jumping off the roof of a Las Vegas hotel in yet another of his ridiculous publicity stunts. His wounds weren’t serious but were enough to hurt his pride: the perfect result. I travelled to New York and back with Virgin Atlantic last week. The food was disgusting, the service inattentive and the leg room in economy almost comically inadequate even for someone as short as I am.

I’m just back from Edinburgh, my 20th successive year at the festival for the Daily Telegraph, which makes me feel very old indeed. How times have changed. When I started going, the paper put us up in the luxurious Sheraton Grand and no questions were asked about the size of your bar bill, which in my case was invariably eye-wateringly large. I also remember becoming bored of eating smoked salmon and Aberdeen Angus steak every day and often feeling desperately lonely in my huge, superbly appointed but utterly soulless room. But for at least a decade now Telegraph hacks have been lodged in communal flats, like students, with some of us not pulling our weight on the washing-up and putting-out-the-rubbish fronts.

My computer gave up the ghost last week. I bought it in 1999 and in recent months it has felt a bit like one of those clapped-out spaceships in Dr Who, held together only with wire and willpower as you force it through the space-time continuum. Normally such technical failure would reduce me to fury or tears or both, but I’ve remained eerily calm. I’ve been living on borrowed time for months, and there is a kind of peace about not feeling a constant need to check your emails. I have however missed the web, six words I thought I would never write.