Paul Johnson

There is more writing about food now than ever before, most of it feeble. There are exceptions. My Somerset neighbour Tamasin Day-Lewis descants admirably on the subject because she knows everything about the raw materials and has a stunning gift for turning that knowledge into noble repasts. She is quick and graceful too in cooking: watching her dance about her kitchen preparing a three-course meal reminds me of Margot Fonteyn performing Nutcracker. But most of the tribe are dull; off-putting too. All they convey is their own overweight greed. My favourite writer on the subject is Lamb. Whenever he touched on it he struck gold.

The litigation about the death of Princess Diana drags on, to the confusion of most of us, the satisfaction of none, and I imagine to the great distress of her two sons. And what is forgotten in this grimy attempt to prove conspiracy theory is the woman herself, a true princess of delight and fantasy. She was a wonderful example of a certain type of gifted woman, the epitome of whom is Rosaline in Love’s Labours Lost. She always insisted that she was uneducated (though her handwriting was excellent) and far from intelligent — ‘thick as two planks’ was the expression she used. But I have never met anyone, male or female, who had such strong powers of intuition. And intuition, I have come to realise, is often as important, sometimes more important, than intellect.

Do the sources disagree? Of course. And so they should. One of the mysterious aspects of human perception is the way in which eye-witnesses disagree about what they have seen. Not just many years later, when memory has had ample time to weave its fantasies, but soon, even immediately, after the event. An interesting case concerns Jimmy Cagney’s masterpiece, The Public Enemy. This brilliant and horrifying movie, with a spectacularly gruesome ending, is now chiefly remembered for one bizarre sequence, in which Cagney, playing the top gangster, is having his room-service breakfast in a slap-up hotel, and is annoyed by his tiresome moll. Suddenly he says ‘Aw, shuttup!’, snatches up a half-grapefruit, and screws it into her face. I remember it vividly.

Charles Lamb, writing to Joseph Hume at Christmas 1807 on the subject of ‘a certain turkey and a contingent plumb-pudding’, added, ‘I always spell plumb-pudding with a b, I think it reads fatter and more suetty’. As it happens, the big OED has found the same suetty spelling in a cookery book published in 1726. As Lamb says, one of the delights of the English language is the existence of words which have almost physical properties, a propensity to conjure up succulence or flavour, warmth or cosiness, sounds and magic, powerful images and sheer solid matter.

At this time of year, exactly 70 years ago, I was taken to my first exhibition of professional conjuring. The magus called himself Dante — he was Danish-American and his real name was Harry Jansen. He had an amazing moustache and beard, wore dazzling evening dress and a red satin-lined cloak, and performed his tricks at lightning speed: his slogan was ‘15 sur- prises in 15 seconds’. However, the performance I would like to have seen most was staged by Charles Dickens on Boxing Day 1843 at a children’s party given by the actor Macready. Dickens had bought at Hamley’s a proper ‘apparatus’ which had belonged to the conjuror Doëbler. Being the man he was he had learned his business thoroughly.

By far the most entertaining show in London is the comprehensive exhibition of paintings by Millais at Tate Britain. In addition to his genius for creating an image which remains in the mind — the surest sign of a great painter — Millais had a wonderful knack of portraying interesting subjects and objects and took immense trouble to get the details right. The most riveting item in the show is ‘The Ruling Passion’, originally called ‘The Ornithologist’, showing an old bird-fancier on his deathbed, surrounded by children mesmerised by his collection of exotics; it is one of the finest bits of painting Millais contrived to pull off. On the left sits a teenage girl — it was 1885 and the artist was 56 — with a Resplendent Quetzal in her lap.

To open a newspaper today is to enter a world of such horror, cruelty, vulgarity and corruption that one cannot imagine why almighty God does not decide, here and now, to put an end to it. But God knows better. There are many fine people around, and beautiful objects, and worthwhile activities, and as the year comes to an end we ought to remember them and give thanks. Just as there are 12 days of Christmas, so there are 12 blessings and here is my list for 2007. By a curious chance they all begin with the letter ‘F’. First of all I give thanks for Family and Friends. Modern governments hate the family and seek to stamp it out. In China it is a criminal offence to have more than one child.

‘Prayer books are the toys of age,’ wrote Pope. Maybe so. But it’s surprising how many old people â” grown-ups â” like children’s toys as well. This Christmas West End shops have stocked up with expensive toys to attract the Russian new rich, what is called the Fabergé Trade. It was always thus. In the New York Metropolitan Museum there is a beautiful dog, carved from ivory, shown running and with a bouncy strip underneath it so it can be made to move â” a mechanical toy in short â” which dates from the Egyptian 18th Dynasty (1554-1305 bc).

My favourite spot in London is the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. I like to sit there, preferably early in the morning, and watch the waterfowl. They are of three kinds. The swans are rulers of the pond, as they must be. I once counted no fewer than 90 of them on the water, but the last time I held a census there were only 22. Swans flying over London, as they constantly do, can see the pond from many miles away, and know it to be a friendly water with plenty of donated food, so they decide to alight there for a spell. They do no harm and are not aggressive — and they are beautiful. No creature ever made by God so consistently conforms to its visual ideal. Their beauty soothes and nourishes. But they lack warmth. Whoever made friends with a swan? The geese arouse mixed feelings.

The great thing about taking a holiday every year in the same place — provided it is the right place of course — is that you notice the huge, reassuring continuities, and the minute changes which prove that life, though stable, is at work. This is what I find in early autumn at Lake Como, which I have now been visiting for the best part of two decades. I look at it very intently, and necessarily so, for I paint it in watercolour every day I am there: at least one picture in the morning, and another in the afternoon, sometimes four per day. I have probably done over 200 watercolour drawings of the lake and its surrounding mountains, its skies, little ports, forests, groves and meadows, each dated.