Paul Johnson

A recent movie suggests that the Duke of Edinburgh’s nickname for the Queen is ‘Cabbage’. His experience dates back to the day when this delicious vegetable was overboiled into tastelessness. But now that most people cook it very lightly and so preserve its fine flavour and crispiness, the term is one of endearment, as (no doubt) he intends. The nickname is originally French, ‘mon petit chou’, and I know at least one other wife who is called cabbage by her spouse, though as an alternative to ‘Old Bag’. Royal nicknames are not as common as you might think. Edward VII was ‘Tum Tum’ (not to his face). The Prince Regent was ‘Prinny’, which let him off lightly considering how awful he was.

The most valuable people on earth are those who can make you laugh. Laughter is the great restorative and rejuvenator. I’m surprised more philosophers have not written about it: only boring Bergson. In recent years the people who have made me laugh most — ‘shriek’, as Nancy Mitford called it — are Carla, Leonie and Taki. Nothing can beat the running gags of life with intimate friends. But I like the professionals, too, who sweat at it, and whose only object is, as they say in Leeds, to ‘prise open them grim jaws of yours with a crowbar’. Query: why are Yorkshiremen so reluctant to laugh? Eric Morecambe from North Lancs used to tell jokes on the point, such as ‘Ee, lad, thou wert so funny I almost laffed.

I can perfectly well understand why someone should be an agnostic. But to be an atheist — to deny flatly and without qualification the existence of God — is to me wholly unsympathetic. The depth of folly, indeed, and not without malice to us all. It makes little sense in reason. For if it is difficult, even strictly speaking impossible, to ‘prove’ the existence of God, in the sense in which we prove a theorem in geometry or the second law of thermodynamics, it is much more difficult to prove that he does not exist. More seriously, atheism necessarily demeans humanity.

It is a long time since I have experienced a ‘touch’. When I was a young man, people were always borrowing from me. I was brought up very strictly. My father said, ‘Never have an overdraft. Never have a mortgage except on your first house, and pay that off as quickly as possible. Never borrow. Always pay bills by return of post.’ I have stuck to these rules, even at Oxford, when I had very little and the temptation to get into debt was great. One of Charles Lamb’s most striking essays is called ‘The Two Great Races of Men’. They are ‘those who borrow and those who lend’. I have always, like Lamb, been a lender. When you are known always to be solvent, people instinctively come to you to borrow.

Dates are important to me. I have always been good at learning them, helped by mnemonics taught me by my mother. When I was seven, attending the convent school and in the class of Sister Angela whom I adored, I had a meretricious triumph, my first of a quasi-public nature. An official visit was paid to the school by the Rt. Hon. Oliver Stanley, president of the board of education. He was the first politician I had seen, let alone met. Big, tall, fat, red-faced, genial and courteous, he shook hands during his classroom tour. Sister Angela introduced me as ‘a bright young man’. ‘Bright, is he?’ said the minister. ‘Well, boy, date of the Battle of Hastings?’ ‘1066.’ ‘Right. Battle of Bannockburn?’ ‘1314.’ ‘Right.

The recent scorching weather in London has brought out some repellent pairs of trousers, particularly those baggy half-length affairs, worn by stocky, thick-calved, T-shirted young men, with shaven heads and beer bellies, who now appear to epitomise English youth. Trousers are useful, indeed indispensable garments, but sartorially the only solution to the trouser problem is to make them as inconspicuous as possible. The moment you notice trousers, critical thoughts arise. This applies to both men and women. Trousers are popularly supposed to date from the 1790s, when they began to replace breeches or culottes, first in Paris, then in London.

As a former treble chorister — you should have heard my ‘Benedictus’ solo from Gounod’s Messe du Sacré Coeur! — I love singing, especially popular ditties. I sing to my latest granddaughter, Daisy, that clever song ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do’. She cannot talk yet but is almost walking, and she wriggles to it rhythmically, so I call her the Cairo belly-dancer. The period 1880 to 1914 was the first golden age of popular songs, most of them British, the best of which my mother used to sing to me when I was tiny.

Nothing separates men from women more significantly than riding a bicycle. Whenever I see a man on a bike in London, he is invariably breaking the law: riding on the pavement, whizzing through a red light, pedalling arrogantly along our one-way street in the forbidden direction. I have never seen a woman doing any of these things. Their cycling is strictly utilitarian, economical, discreet, at modest speeds and on machines which have no element of display. What does this tell us about the sexes? Well, it certainly makes me revert again to my technological vision of the future, in which men have been eliminated, their prime function taken over by perpetual sperm-banks, and with selection procedures ruling out male babies.

I am disquietingly conscious of feeling smaller than I was; relatively, that is. For most of my life, being six foot one, I have loomed over the majority of men and almost all women. Now, at the local Sainsbury’s, where queues are constant as they are too mean to employ enough staff, I find I am often out-topped by young fellow-queuers, sometimes even by girls. Many of the young men are enormous, six-and-a-half, even seven feet. Female six-footers stride along the pavements, elbowing elderly dwarves out of the way. When I was a young man living in Paris, one of my girlfriends was a six-footer, an American called Euphemia, whom the goggling French thought a gratte-ciel. But that was most unusual. My French girls tended to be around five foot two or three.

Studying, the other day, Nicholas Hilliard’s exquisite miniature ‘Young Man Among Roses’, I decided that it epitomised everything that was most delicious about Elizabethan England. Who, I wondered, gave it to the Victoria & Albert Museum, where the young man now stands in his briery bower? I discovered it was an Australian collector called George Salting (1835–1909), a dim figure who led an obscure life and then left Britain the biggest single series of art donations in her history, remarkable not just for its quantity but for its superlative quality. The kind of person who amasses great collections often amazes me, and leads me to conclude that taste in art has nothing to do with either moral fibre or brainpower.

On 12 May I sat down at a café on the square, ordered coffee and Perrier, and began to sketch the west front of Strasbourg Cathedral. This was presumptuous: the complexity of the facade would have baffled the skill even of Muirhead Bone, who taught my father to draw, and who was the greatest architectural draftsman since Piranesi. Strasbourg is over 2,000 years old. There was a cathedral on the site as early as ad 550, and the present one, of red sandstone from the Vosges, was more than three centuries a-building (1200–1521). The plans for the west front survive, and are in the marvellous cathedral museum, showing that a dozen different architects, over 200 years, had a hand in the project.

Wandering through the Vale of Taunton recently, I reflected that few places on earth could be more fair in April-time. The trees were still mostly bare but the blossom was out in many places, and the entire countryside bore an air of expectation and awakening in the pale, tentative sunlight. The carpet of arable, pasture and woodland leans upward from the valley bottom into the Brendon and Blackdown hills, with the Quantocks to the north-east. Not much has changed here in 100 years or indeed 200. The landscape is a magical blend of man’s making and pure nature. Here is farming and nothing else: no industry, few roads of any consequence, a single railway line resurrected from the Beeching massacre of half a century ago, its trains whistling mournfully from time to time.

‘Nothing puzzles me more than time and space,’ wrote Charles Lamb, ‘and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them.’ ‘Nothing puzzles me more than time and space,’ wrote Charles Lamb, ‘and yet nothing troubles me less, as I never think about them.’ Well I do; more and more, as becomes someone of my age, for as Dr Johnson said, ‘At seventy-seven it is time to be in earnest.’ Space is fiendishly difficult. I get lost in the intricacies of String Theory and the debate about whether there are nine dimensions or ten. Much easier to believe in miracles.

It is a curious fact, well attested by history, that a downright ugly man need never despair of attracting women, even pretty ones. The recent uproar over John Prescott and his mistress is a good example. Of course this may have been a case of power acting as an aphrodisiac. Henry Kissinger, a keen student of such matters, has always insisted that power, or even mere office, is a sexual magnet. I recall him leaning across a dinner table, at a time when the antics of the late Alan Clark were in the headlines, and seeking from me an explanation of Clark’s success. He was particularly struck by the conquest of what Clark called ‘the Coven’ — the wife of a South African judge and their two daughters (a third wasn’t interested).

Truly good people have always been rarities, and ours is not an age which nourishes them by attention and respect. When a good person dies, it is not headline news but, rather, a private tragedy for friends, who thereby lose a beacon in their own confused and muddled lives, someone they could regard as a mentor and who could be relied on to tell them gently but truthfully where they had lost direction. That was how I, and I think many others, saw Christian, Lady Hesketh, always known as Kisty: someone to turn to in time of trouble, for counsel and comfort. Her death earlier this month, swift and peaceful, was not unexpected, for she had long been ill and bore the signs of increasing frailty.

It is exactly 100 years since F.E. Smith made the most famous maiden speech in history. Do MPs still make maidens? One never hears of them. Indeed one never hears of any speeches in the Commons these days; as a theatre of oratory it is dead. But it was a different matter in 1906. The January election was among the most disastrous in Conservative history. From having a majority of 134, they found themselves with barely 150 seats, and the Liberal majority was 356. This nadir of Tory fortune gave Smith a fine opportunity to make his name at a stroke by restoring their morale in his first speech (he was the newly elected MP for Walton, Liverpool), delivered on 11 March at 10 p.m., then regarded as the best slot of the day.