Harry Mount

Ancient Greek, once central to a western European education, is on life support. Last summer, 206 pupils sat an A-level in ancient Greek. Of those, only a handful were state-educated. So it’s farewell to the language taught in our schools since the 16th century. Farewell to the language of the New Testament; the language Roman nobles revered and the emperors spoke. Julius Caesar’s last words weren’t ‘Et tu, Brute?’ They were ‘Kai su, teknon?’ – ‘You too, my child?’ As A.N. Wilson recently wrote: ‘Someone once said that all western philosophy is just footnotes to Plato. All western literature is just footnotes to Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Homer.

When the cops came calling to arrest Peter Mandelson this week, he was already lawyered up. And he’s secured the services of the best – and most expensive – lawyers in town. Mandelson is now staring down the barrel of a legal bill running into the hundreds of thousands of pounds – very possibly the millions, given the mammoth number of documents in the Epstein Files his lawyers will have to trawl through. Add in the forensic examination of government emails swapped in the build-up to Mandelson’s catastrophic appointment as British Ambassador to Washington – and the lawyers’ tills will be cheerfully ringing away.

In the strange, arcane world of school mottoes, it’s fitting that the most famous one of all belongs to a fictional school. Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus – ‘Never tickle a sleeping dragon’ – is the motto of the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. J.K. Rowling brilliantly realised that children aren’t put off by boarding schools and the ancient rituals that go with them. They’re gripped by these peculiar places, their roots twisting back through the mists of time. And no school custom is as ancient or beguiling as the Latin motto. My motto, at Westminster School, was Dat deus incrementum – ‘God gives the increase’.

Odysseus is back on his eternal journey to Ithaca – and he’s sailing towards your cinema screen. Ralph Fiennes is playing Odysseus in The Return, released last week. And Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey, starring Matt Damon as the cleverest of the Greeks at Troy, should be out next year. I criss-crossed the Mediterranean for three years, in the wake of Odysseus, for a book – and I’m convinced The Odyssey is true. OK, the monsters, like man-eating Scylla and the one-eyed Cyclops, might not have existed. And you’d have to be a Zeus-fearing type to believe in the gods toying with Odysseus’s fate on Mount Olympus. But the catastrophic storms that tossed Odysseus back and forth across the Med are certainly true.

These are some of the things I worried about this morning. Should I brush my teeth while drawing the curtains, to save time? Should I get out of the bath at 7.40 a.m. or 7.45 a.m. to be fully clothed for the Tesco home delivery between 8 a.m. and 9 a.m.? Should I instantly pick up the coat hanger that fell off the door handle as I left my bedroom or wait till I return this evening? These are mind-staggeringly boring things to think about. They’re even more boring to write down. That is the life of the worrier: a new worry dropping into the brain roughly every five seconds. Life is one huge to-do list for us worriers.

In Dad’s Army, Lance Corporal Jones, played by Clive Dunn, fought in six campaigns, from the Sudan in 1884 to the second world war. Well, my great-grandfather, Field Marshal Francis Grenfell, 1st Baron Grenfell, can beat that. He joined up at 18 in 1859 and stayed in the army for 65 years, until his death at 83, 100 years ago, on 27 January 1925. And then, in a tragic coda to his extraordinary life, he gave his name to Grenfell Tower, where 72 lives were lost in a fire in 2017. This week, Angela Rayner told bereaved families that the tower is to be demolished. Lord Grenfell was the ultimate Colonel Blimp – he even looked like him, handlebar moustache and all. The Zelig of the British Empire, he saw everything.

Scylla and Charybdis are said to have sat off the Sicilian coast, where Mike Lynch’s boat foundered, and where 3,200 years before, Odysseus navigated between the monster and the whirlpool. Many think of the Med as a gentle sea, more like an oversized eternity pool, unbothered by the killer storms and cliff-high waves that rage beyond Gibraltar. The howling wind had ripped along the coast, whisking the beach away overnight I thought that, too, before I was bashed up by wild tempests in the two years I criss-crossed the Mediterranean in Odysseus’s wake. One morning, I turned up at a hotel on Mykonos. As I made my way to the breakfast table, the agitated maître d’ shimmered up and said, ‘I’m so sorry, sir, the beach has been washed away overnight.

What’s the biggest division in life? Between clever people and stupid people? Between the good-looking and the ugly? No. The fundamental difference is between the ones who do things quickly and the ones who do them slowly.  You know that friend who emails you back the moment you email them for a favour? Or the builder who comes round the morning you ring him? These are the modern saints – the hyper-efficient deities who put to shame that other friend who only ever rings when they want something out of you; or the plumber you have to ring three times and only ever rings back to say he isn’t coming after all.