Toby Clements

Notes on…interiors

There have already been one or two accuracy-related gripes about the BBC’s summer extravaganza The White Queen, but one anachronism was especially interesting: it was a touching scene of a medieval mother waking her medieval children from their medieval slumber. They were all wrapped together in a lovely bed in lovely sheets and the room was a lovely whitewashed, heavily beamed yet airy attic, the windows of which were diaphanous with linen. It was more The White Company than The White Queen.

Who’s afraid of Santa Claus?

Toby Clements says that there’s a good reason many children find Father Christmas an alarming figure — he’s an unresolved hotch-potch of different myths Last year in the run-up to Christmas I took my two-year-old son to get his hair cut in one of those strange hybrid toy-cum-barber shops that proliferate in north London. It was going as well as one could hope until they announced a surprise guest as a special treat, Father Christmas. In he came, roaring his ho ho hos and waggling his curly white beard. It didn’t matter to my son that it was just a local fatty wearing a lot of cotton wool and a velour hoodie. All that mattered was that he was strange.