Katharine Whitehorn

A welcome call from son in California: as usual it takes five minutes at least to balance the mental time-of-day differences. In theory, I could call him at four o’clock my time and he’d be awake — just; but I’d have had seven hours to get used to being awake, he’s only just (reluctantly)started. Which is another reason I’m not keen to adopt Skype: it’s bad enough trying to sound alert when you’re half asleep, worse still if you had actually to look bright and focused. Son in question, Jake Lyall, is becoming an actor, day job writing software.

I knew Bernard Levin when we both worked on The Spectator at the end of the Fifties, during its uncharacteristically radical period. He wrote a parliamentary sketch under the name of Taper, and was about the first to treat the political scene as theatre — and amateur theatre at that — rather than a court of high seriousness, though the idea of doing it that way came from the editor, Brian Inglis. Bernard called it ‘the principle that you mainly record the slipping false teeth of those with whose views you disagree’. Inglis, the man who invented the phrase ‘fringe medicine’, had plucked Bernard from the magazine Truth, where he was doing theatre criticism.