Matthew Parris

Sleeping with Agatha Christie and the ghosts of guests past in Syria’s Baron Hotel Do you believe in ghosts? I wish I did, for were I to entertain the flimsiest hope that some relic of a personality could haunt a place where once they were, then I should not have slept a wink last night, for the thrill of who might linger. But I slept soundly in Agatha Christie’s bedroom. T.E. Lawrence slept next door. Where am I? Well, if I tell you that any visiting Madame Arcati would expect to contact — besides those two — Field Marshall Lord Slim, Lord Hore-Belisha, H.V. Morton, María Teresa de Borbón and Princess Eugénie of Greece, do you begin to guess? Did I mention Peter, Prince of Greece, or Dr Schacht, the Nazis’ banker?

It was in the spring that I went to the funeral of Andrew Cavendish, the late and 11th Duke of Devonshire, at Edensor on Chatsworth Estate in Derbyshire. It was almost five years to the day after his death that last Friday I went to the funeral of Ken Buxton in Flash, in Staffordshire. Though they are not far from each other, the bleak Staffordshire moorlands are a different world to the sweet, grassy banks of the Derbyshire Wye where it flows through Chatsworth Park. And Andrew Cavendish and Ken Buxton lived anyway in different worlds, one a duke in his eighties, the other a supplier of plastic tanks in his fifties; and though both would have been friendly had they met, they could have had little to discuss. But something links them, and through each of their funerals it shone.

What came over me? I’m not a natural lawbreaker and was never a rebel as a youth. I deplore poll-tax rioters, eco-rioters and every lawless protest against supposed injustice, and read with awe of Charles Moore’s defiant stand against the TV licence people, wondering at the desperado our one-time Spectator editor has in later years become. But it was with two other editors of this magazine very present in my imagination, that my (to me) astonishing moment of criminal madness occurred. I was coming back from dinner in Chelsea with Virginia Johnson, Frank Johnson’s widow. I loved Frank, the last-but-one editor of this magazine.

When I was a boy I never really understood strong winds, still less storms. I’m not sure I do now. This was not due to complete ignorance of meteorology. Something of a star pupil at geography (why the weather was geography rather than physics baffled me), I absorbed with interest and some degree of comprehension the explanation of wind. Warm air, heated by the sun, would rise; and cooler air would waft in to take its place. Thus (I appreciated) a light breeze might waft from the cool sea to the warmer land during the day; but, by night, as the land grew cooler than the ocean, the airflow would reverse and a breeze blow from land to sea. All around the globe, as air pressures dropped or rose in one place or another, air would be sucked from one place to another to rebalance.

Like skaters on a lake’s frozen surface, we are sometimes reminded how thin is the crust of philosophical confidence on which our systems of political economy rest. Two years ago we were mostly agreed that free market economics had won the ancient argument between capitalism and the planned economy. Two years ago the case for a single market for goods and labour within the European Union was widely thought unanswerable. Yet everywhere we turn today, wise heads mutter that the global free market has failed.

I was walking along Limehouse Causeway, a narrow street running close to the Thames in East London. It was about half past eight in the morning, I was short of sleep and feeling temporarily annoyed with, oh, nothing in particular — just everything. Approaching a junction I saw from some distance that the pedestrian railings hugging this corner were a mass of flowers and paper. That irritated me. Presumably a memorial to somebody who had died nearby. Sad, no doubt, but we never used to make roadside shrines like this in England and the habit has always struck me as mawkish and somehow pagan. Getting closer, it became clear that the whole corner had been turned into a crematorium-style display, with masses of blossoms, trinkets, letters, soft toys and the like.

A splendid Spectator 180th anniversary issue was published this year. Along with many readers, I fell upon a treasury of previously published columns: a selection of examples through the magazine’s history of the wit, erudition and style of contributors since 1828. We found pieces by Graham Greene, John Buchan and Bernard Levin; letters from George Orwell, Winston Churchill and Nancy Mitford; and reviews from Kingsley Amis and Lord David Cecil. Hand poised above the tub, the reader could plunge into this lucky dip for a miscellany of prizes. But there was a fair measure of sawdust awaiting him too. Not every column was as sparkling as the next. Not every ancient contribution surpassed the modern ones.

To understand the true nature of history, let us start with the question of Napoleon’s piles Cometh the hour, cometh the piles? Well, Wellington called Waterloo ‘the closest run thing you ever saw in your life’, and on the morning of battle, Napoleon was too exhausted and distracted by pain from his haemorrhoids to focus or to ride out. So did piles cost Napoleon that winning edge? Is Alaska part of the United States because in 1867 Tsar Alexander II had overspent on a big naval expedition and was temporarily but acutely short of cash? Is our belief in the potency of spinach due entirely to the misplacing of a decimal point when in 1870 a German scientist assessed the vegetable’s iron content?

Very long flights — flights like mine, to and from Australia, for instance — offer such an opportunity to think that you can tease a thought almost to the point of madness. What follows may read like that, and if you don’t wish to perform mental gymnastics on a nerdish pinhead until you’re intellectually giddy, quit now. But I’ve been turning over in my mind a recurrent problem in human reasoning that in real life irritates and trips us all, leading to endless misunderstandings — and I may have cracked it.

Kookaburras don’t really laugh, but I can see why the old song suggests it: a weird, taunting call, which does have a kind of dark comicality about it. And this is one of the sounds that wake me each morning in Hunters Hill — where I find that The Spectator now has an Australian edition. I’m staying in a lovely Victorian house in Sydney, built from huge blocks of the warm yellow sandstone that characterises many of the older residences here. This house dates from the 1880s and, apart from its size and generosity and the extent of its garden tumbling down towards the Harbour, it is almost indistinguishable from the grander sort of detached suburban houses that were being built in Britain, in places like Edinburgh, Cheltenham or Leamington Spa, around the same time.

Wherever the civilised English gather to discuss the state we’re in, it is almost axiomatic to allow that we’re getting less refined. Discourse, public and private, is (we tell each other) getting cruder; wit is duller; our culture is dumbing down. A vulgarity and obviousness is gaining ground over the art of delicate suggestion. Nowhere do we assume this to be truer than in the use of language for the purposes of discourtesy. Twenty years ago, when I first began putting together an anthology of insult and abuse, I would have subscribed to this view.

In these straitened days, when the international money markets teeter nervily between relief and panic, and stock exchanges hang upon the slightest twitch of one of Alistair Darling’s implausible eyebrows, I must be mindful of my position in the camelid world. If I sneeze, the British llama market may catch pneumonia. Not that I am any sort of a spokesman. Llamas and alpacas have greater authorities than me to pronounce on their welfare and prospects. Wise and expert breeders in Britain constitute a community in which I’m a very minor player — indeed I fear my subscription to the Camelids Chronicle may even have lapsed.