Steve Morris

Some years ago, I managed to get an invitation to a very exclusive party. One of the guests was Prince Philip and some way into the evening he drifted over in my direction. He used the classic royal conversation opener: ‘Hello, what’s been keeping you busy?’ ‘I work in marketing,’ I replied. ‘Oh dear,’ he said. He turned away and went to find someone more interesting. I was officially boring. That’s fine, because I have made it my lifetime’s work to seek out the boring at parties. Those who drone on, those who tell the same story over and over, and those with that odd nasal monotone that makes most people desperate to escape their company. I am not alone in this. C.S. Lewis did the same thing.

Geoff Capes, two-time winner of The World’s Strongest Man competition, weighing in at 27 stone, was a budgie fancier. He kept them, bred them and was even president of the Budgerigar Society in 2008. The fascination started for him when he was a copper in the 1960s and came across a budgie in the house of someone he arrested. The villain entrusted Capes with six of the birds. Capes was smitten. We don’t know what happened to the criminal. In our modern world of cockapoos and designer dogs, the budgie – which was wildly popular in the 1950s and 1960s – could do with a comeback. Our lives would be better with them. They hark back to a simpler time when pets were pets and not designer accessories. Budgies are native to the grasslands of Australia.

In January 1894, an assistant of Thomas Edison made a five-second silent film of Fred Ott taking snuff and then sneezing. It was the second ever film to be copyrighted – and it started with a sneeze. The sneeze is a blessing and a curse, associated with good fortune and ill omen. In ancient Greece it was a prophetic sign from the gods – a sneeze could confirm the gods’ blessing of a decision. By the end of the 6th century, with plague sweeping through Rome, it had become associated with illness and death. Pope Pelagius II died from plague mid-sneeze. His successor, Gregory the Great, declared by papal decree that ‘God bless you’ was the appropriate response of a Christian when someone sneezes, to keep the wildness and danger at bay.

One day while walking in Peckham Rye Park, William Blake saw angels sitting in the trees: ‘bright angelic wings bespangled every bough like stars’. He was eight years old. His fascination – some have called it obsession – with angels lasted for the rest of his life. When he sat to have his portrait painted by Thomas Phillips, the two men began to argue about who painted a better angel, Michelangelo or Raphael. Phillips, not unreasonably, suggested that since Blake had never seen even an engraving by Michelangelo, he was not qualified to give an opinion on the matter. ‘But I speak from the opinion of a friend who could not be mistaken,’ replied Blake. ‘And who may he be, I pray?’ asked Phillips. ‘The Archangel Gabriel, sir.

Worse for drink, and lonely in his Hollywood apartment, F. Scott Fitzgerald sat down to write a postcard. He began, ‘How are you?’, an important question as he was planning to send the postcard to himself.  Although he never sent it, perhaps he understood the magical ability of the postcard to cheer us up. They’ve been doing that since the first ones – plain cards bearing a pre-printed stamp – were introduced into Britain in 1870. It took time for the current format as we know it to develop: picture on one side and, on the other, a space for the address and some words. By the Edwardian period, 800 million cards were being sent a year.

There was, at least until recently, an old sign round the back of the Savoy banning whistling by staff or tradesmen. Whistling, it seems, can wind up some people. Winston Churchill hated the practice. Posters were put up in the War Rooms forbidding it. One day, on his way to Downing Street, he heard a paperboy whistling and sharply told him to stop it at once. The boy had some spirit and argued back: ‘Why should I, you can shut your ears can’t you?’ Churchill found this amusing — even if he never learned to love whistling. If he’d lived in my house, he’d have seen it a little differently. When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, men — and it generally was men — seemed always to be whistling.

For the first time in 30-odd years, many Brits have started eating winkles again. Unable to holiday abroad this summer, we headed to the British seaside and rediscovered the winkle stalls that were once part of everyday life. Winkle recipes — similar to snail recipes — are suddenly popping up, and October is the perfect month for picking these shore-dwelling molluscs. For me, a winkle has a Proustian effect. Every Sunday when I was a child, we’d have winkles for tea. My father would put some on each of our plates and we’d have an eggcup full of vinegar, some pepper, and our own winkling pin to get the little blighters out.

By the 1980s, after decades of immense popularity, the great British holiday camp was in terminal decline. The huge camps founded by Billy Butlin and Fred Pontin — the chalets, the dining hall, the redcoats (Butlin’s) and bluecoats (Pontins) — were becoming passé. Now the few that remain have been rebranded as holiday villages. But why not bring them back? Surely old-fashioned camps had exactly what we need today: simplicity, gentle fun and a sense of community. They were about team effort, not atomised nuclear families. Above all perhaps, they had a sense of identity. And they were a life-changer for me. I recently came across an online video of Gunton Hall, near Lowestoft, in the late 1970s.