Philip Womack

At long last, hardback books, it seems, are finally drifting into, if not obsolescence, then at least abeyance. It turns out that punters are chary of buying hefty tomes, and so publishers are considering putting books out in paperback first. For once, this is a literary development that I will be applauding.  For centuries, hardback books were the only thing you could buy. In the 1920s, it was impossible to stroll along with a paperback of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse in your pocket to impress the ladies, since paperbacks of that sort did not exist. They are a relatively new beast on the literary scene. It was Allen Lane who brought the sixpenny paperback into the world in the 1930s, a feat for which he should be lauded, on a par with Alexander Fleming.

The ermines have been mothballed; the coronets stowed away. The United Kingdom has, at last, thrown out the hereditary peers from Parliament. This levelling process, begun by Tony (not yet Lord) Blair, and stymied for decades, has come to an end. It’s as if the lion and the unicorn had been torn from the royal coat of arms, and ordered to find other work. No longer will we gawp at the peers processing at the opening of Parliament, arrayed alongside their glittering spouses, their titles and names a reminder of centuries of history. Our parliament - the most ancient in the world - has lost that lustre for ever, and will increasingly resemble the bland, managerial talking-shops of Europe.

You’d be hard pressed to find a more continuous strand in British culture than the chorister. They’ve been warbling in Westminster Abbey since the 1380s. Every national occasion is marked by choirs, the choristers dazzling in their splendidly anachronistic ruffs and robes, present at moments of collective joy or sadness. Funerals, memorial services, royal weddings, carols from King’s College, Cambridge. They are ornaments to our culture. Oodles of composers, musicians and singers, professional or not, have, over hundreds of years, stood in the choir stalls at dawn, at midnight, and lifted their voices to the vaulting roofs. Some of the most beautiful music in the canon was written for choirs: Gregorian chants, Thomas Tallis.

Chloe Zhao may have co-written and directed Hamnet (a film about William Shakespeare’s son), but she claims that she couldn’t understand Shakespeare’s words and had to rely on the actor Paul Mescal to help her. You might have thought that Zhao, who spent her sixth form years at Brighton College (where, one hopes, she at least sniffed at some form of Shakespeare), could have bestirred herself to read one of the many editions with glossaries, or even to bone up on the CliffsNotes, but no. Instead, she is simply contributing to the enduring, frustrating idea that reading Shakespeare is ‘difficult’, as if it were on a par with analytical philosophy or Judith Butler wanging on about hegemonies.

Growing up, it was made very clear to us that if you RSVPed in the positive to a party, you were absolutely honour-bound to turn up. It was the height of rudeness to chuck. How things have changed. These days, people don’t even bother RSVPing: it’s too difficult. Some are even too lazy to click a thumbs-up on a WhatsApp. More charitably, perhaps they have all suffered collective memory loss, or don’t understand the French. I know what you do when you get an email invitation, or when somebody texts you with the date and time of a party. You think ‘how nice’, and then do absolutely nothing about it until the week before.

At some point during this Advent season and the coming of Christmas, you will log on to your computer, and you will see somebody smugly opining that ‘actually Christmas is a pagan festival’. This person will not know anything about pagans, bar some fuzzy ideas about equinoxes (always with the equinoxes) and sacrifice. The reasons given for this will vary: we put up trees in our houses and decorate them, just like pagans! We light candles! And we give presents, like the Romans did at Saturnalia or the Vikings at Yule or [insert random pagan festival here]. And 25 December is actually the festival of the Roman god Sol Invictus! And it’s near the solstice! And doesn’t it all have something to do with Mithras anyway?

The venerable magazine GQ, or Gentlemen’s Quarterly, has issued some 125 diktats about what it takes to be a gentleman in this world of Zoom calls and equality. GQ is, however, no longer quarterly, and some might say it hasn’t been read by gentlemen for some time. Ought we, then, to listen to it? Many of its ‘expert’ pronouncements are baffling: what is ‘popping a Zyn’? Most of the suggestions are about bringing fancy olive oil or luxury candles to parties. (Note to readers, though you won’t need it: don’t.) It also suggests that gentlemen should beclothe themselves in ‘loungewear’, a word which ought to make anyone shudder. Well, I’m sorry, but unless it’s a silk dressing gown from Jermyn Street, I think not.

Sometimes, when I’m chatting about childhood, at some point it will become clear I went to a boarding school from the age of nine. Reactions can be comical. ‘You poor thing!’ an interlocutor might gasp, gripping my forearm, no doubt picturing cold showers and cruelty. I’ve always responded with bemusement, since my experience largely featured comfort and crumpets. I loved my prep school – Dorset House in West Sussex. It was a world in itself, enclosed and beguiling. In some ways it was unchanging, such as the graffitied Latin primers which were the same our grandparents had used. Yet it could be surprisingly forward-looking, as when it made a satellite link-up to a school in America, many years before the internet.

Re-reading Agatha Christie’s A Murder is Announced this week (it’s the summer holidays! I can relax like anyone else!), I was struck by one of Miss Marple’s wise pronouncements: And that’s really the particular way the world has changed since the war. Take this place, Chipping Cleghorn, for instance. It’s very much like St Mary Mead where I live. Fifteen years ago one knew who everybody was. The Bantrys in the big house – and the Hartnells and the Price Ridleys and the Weatherbys… They were people whose fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers, or whose aunts and uncles, had lived there before them.

Stanley Kubrick’s swooningly gorgeous film, Barry Lyndon, has just been re-released in cinemas to mark its 50th anniversary. Much ink has been spilled about its hypnotic beauty, its lavish attention to historical detail, its dreamy, luscious, candlelit photography. Yet William Thackeray’s bitingly satirical novel of the same name is often neglected – as is the true, harrowing story that inspired it. The book Barry Lyndon (first published in 1844) bore its genesis from the story of a real adventurer, Andrew Robinson Bowes, whose cruelty to his wife, the Countess of Strathmore, was notorious.

Those of us of a certain vintage will remember the National Record of Achievement, a brown, crummy-looking folder, sent (personally, I like to think) by Tony Blair to every schoolchild in the country. We were encouraged to keep our certificates within its corporate leaves, from Swimming Level 1 Goldfish to Duke of Edinburgh. Presumably, before the government had this idea, people didn’t know what to do with certificates. Perhaps they were used as kindling, or eaten. Receiving a certificate was a moment of fulfilment. If it came in the post, anticipation was part of the process. Being awarded one in person had extra frisson. Some certificates were better than others. The Associated Board of Royal Schools of Music (how the name hums with authority!