Melanie McDonagh

What Victoria is to a jam sponge, so is Sacher to chocolate cake. It’s a man, a hotel and a cake and, indeed, shorthand for a city. The lines of people outside the Sacher Hotel café in Vienna for chocolate cake with whipped cream on the side are looking for a Viennese experience, like schnitzel, Strauss waltzes or pictures by Klimt. Sacher cake is something you find everywhere, but this one is grounded in a particular place, the Café Sacher. The 360,000 Sacher tortes of varying sizes that are made yearly in its manufactory and dispatched in classy wooden boxes are the exemplars of a formula that has taken over the world. It’s not every hotel where you get chocolate cake for breakfast The cake predates the hotel.

So Debrett’s has really got behind the latest technology by issuing a guide to the appropriate use of the mobile phone, or rather, ten commandments. The oldies are warned that young people take fright at an unexpected call – text first to see if it’s convenient – and the young are told that they should give a caller their undivided attention on the basis that it’s perfectly obvious if you’re doing something else and ‘This can be very alienating for the recipient, who feels marginalised and deprioritised’.   The thing about the demise of landlines is that it’s pretty well impossible to get hold of anyone easily without it That’s all very well and bears out the weird ways communication is going.

Those of us who grew up with a traditional Halloween, that is to say, in Ireland, don’t have much truck with the contemporary version. The pumpkin-coloured, gore and chocolate fest that has come to Britain via the US is gross by comparison; we had a simple version. We dressed up, but in masks and any old clothes we could lay our hands on. We had nuts and apples for bobbing, not chocolate in the shape of severed fingers. We went from house to house looking for a penny for the bobbin’, not trick or treating. And the thing you really looked forward to was barm brack. Halloween was a time for ghosts, not chainsaw massacres It’s actually a fruited, not too sweet yeast loaf, which is really good buttered, and if a bit stale, toasted and buttered.

Sir Ranulph Fiennes (a third cousin of Ralph, since you ask) has written a book about Lawrence of Arabia. He feels an affinity with him: he too has led Arabs in fighting, in Sir Ranulph’s case, for the Sultan of Oman. ‘I’d been in Arabia, leading Arabs against the Marxist rebels. In Lawrence’s day, the British were fighting the Germans and the Turks’.   ‘It’s my DNA. My ancestors did lots of travel in new places’ The circumstances differed. ‘Lawrence had camels and was dealing with a huge body of men; I had six open-topped Land Rovers with two machine guns and I led 30 men; a mixture of Belushis and Oman Arabs and Zanzibars. I felt about the men as a family.’ What does he make of Lawrence’s extraordinary career? ‘It mystified me’, he says.

Happy Birthday, Disney. A hundred years ago today, Walt and his brother Roy formed the Disney Brothers’ Studio to produce a series of short films based on Alice in Wonderland, a successor to Walt’s original Laugh-O-Gram studio. It helped shape the American imagination and transformed the art of animation. If you meet anyone who actually saw the original Snow White in the cinema – as the late Stewart Steven told me – you’ll find they recall being scared out of their wits by the scene where Snow White runs through the forest with eyes and groping hands following her. Actually, there’s an awful lot to scare the viewer in Snow White. And no one has ever bettered ‘Hi Ho, Hi Ho’, as an animation melody.

If you want a handy metaphor for contemporary childrearing, it’s a colourful plastic box with big red buttons on it. Yoto is the name, and before long, you’ll be seeing it where you already see children using screens – so pretty much everywhere. One in 50 British homes with a child under 12 is said to have one. It’s like a CD player-cum-iPad with ambitions to run your child’s life. The essential bits of it are plastic cards that you or the child – the idea is that the child has agency here – slot into the player to listen to a story, but there’s a whole range of other options – radio, podcasts, night lights, sound effects.

A friend from Lewisham, south London, reports occasionally on her children’s state school, which has a reputation for being strife- and strike-prone. However, the children themselves – nursery and reception – are engaged in more calming activities. They are doing mindfulness. ‘My son loves it,’ she says. They sit down cross-legged at least once a week to take in the sounds around them (‘listen to the birds!’), concentrate on their breathing and focus on the present moment. My friend did ask the teachers whether it was possible to get five-year-olds to sit still for that long. ‘Yes,’ she was told. ‘In fact, some fall asleep.