Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Tuesday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

From pike-and-pitchfork brigade to crack militia: ‘Dad’s Army’ wasn’t so ludicrous after all

Ever since the BBC’s Dad’s Army (which ran from 1968 to 1977), it’s been hard to keep a straight face when talking about the Home Guard. Just thinking about Corporal Jones one beat out from the rest of the platoon during drill makes us go weak. Sinclair McKay’s book on the subject, actually called Dad’s Army, does not shirk from the hilarious aspects of this domestic front line of two million volunteers at its peak, many of whom did a full day’s work before turning out to practise defending their country all evening and sometimes all night.

Monday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Do you have the patience to own an EV?

There’s a distinctive glow of virtue that emanates from people recharging their electric cars in public places. I call it the Light of the Charge Brigade. In the run-up to Easter, I spent two hours observing the phenomenon at Fleet Services on the M3. It was mostly men doing the charging. They’ve cracked the EV way of life, and are very pleased with themselves. A sparklingly fulfilled man called Paul was driving from Colchester to Seaton in Devon in his Skoda Enyaq with a carload of friends. He’d planned this stop for a first charge and Pret elevenses. Later he was planning to stop at Montacute House in Somerset for a late lunch and a second charge on one of the National Trust’s chargers.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

The war on the London pied-à-terre

Let’s say you’re a young woman working in London, and you own a one-bedroom flat in Islington. You fall in love with a chap who has a nice house in Devon. You marry him.  As soon as you do that, you’ll no longer be allowed to park your car outside your Islington flat in the daytime, except on a meter for a maximum stay of two hours. A married couple is only permitted one primary residence between them, and the larger country house will most likely be designated the main home. In all central London boroughs (not just Camden as in this example), you’re not eligible for a resident’s parking permit if the dwelling is your second home, even though you pay the full council tax. Worse: you’ll soon be paying double the council tax.

Thursday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

How should today’s pupils be disciplined?

On top of the canings and endless gym-shoe whackings – those ‘short, sharp shock’ corporal punishments endured by prep-school children (especially boys) until the late 1970s – what were the most memorable punishments inflicted on pupils born from the 1930s onwards? To put today’s more humane prep-school punishments in perspective (they’re not even called punishments but ‘sanctions’), I asked people in their seventies and above which punishments they most remembered. ‘The Denzil Blip,’ said Julian Campbell, who was at The Hall School in London in the 1950s. ‘Denzil Packard had been a prisoner of war of the Japanese and had a mangled finger. Offending boys were clipped on the head, with this finger being the point of contact.

Thursday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

‘If you’re inspired by music, you’ll do better in exams’: Conductor Ralph Allwood on why music matters for children

Here’s some life advice Ralph Allwood gives to the teenagers who attend his week-long residential Rodolfus Choral Courses, held all through the summer at various schools and colleges across the country. Some of the singers are being pressured by their parents to take just maths and sciences, or other lucrative career-oriented subjects, for A-level or at university, and to give up music. ‘Right,’ he says, as the teenagers assemble for a final rehearsal, ‘this is how you decide what you’re going to do next. Get advice from everyone you can: from your teachers, your parents, the universities, that aunt who wants you to do a sensible subject. Say thank you, then go into your own room and close the door. There, make up your own mind about what you want to do.

Wednesday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

How to master the left-wing brag

No one likes a blatant boaster. So, as adults, we learn that if we want to boast, we must be subtle about it. The way to show off without being loathed is to drop small details about your life into your conversation and your prose, to signal your taste, education, career achievements and social status. Doing this is tricky enough for right-wing people, who need to come up with subtle ways of letting others know, for example, that they can afford private school fees, went to Oxbridge, shop at Waitrose, own at least one home and go on holiday in Provence or Tuscany. Words and phrases such as ‘exeat’, ‘scraped through my Prelims’, ‘perfectly ripe avocados’, ‘basement kitchen’ and ‘bumping up through the olive grove’ do the work.

Tuesday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Am I allowed to find Tom Stoppard boring?

I didn’t breathe a word of my true reaction while filing into the top-floor bar of the Old Vic theatre last week after the three-hour production of Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia was over. It would have been mortifying to be overheard muttering any adverse comments, when swaths of intellectual Stoppard-lovers from all over London and the Home Counties were crowding on to the staircase. Stoppard is a national treasure and to say anything rude about his work, especially in the three months after his death, would be heresy.   It was only on the pavement walking towards Waterloo that I dared to say to my husband: ‘I must say, I wasn’t moved by it.

Tuesday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Mark Haddon attempts to exorcise the memory of a loveless childhood

Growing up in the 1960s at 288a Main Road on the outskirts of Northampton, Mark Haddon spent hours alone in the bathroom, the only lockable room in the house, trying to figure out the universe. In this dark, sui-generis memoir he writes: Even now, insoluble conundrums such as ‘Why was I born as me and not someone else?’ and ‘If the universe is expanding, then what is it expanding into?’ come packaged with images of a shampoo bottle in the shape of a fat sailor with a twist-off head. The author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time has a scientifically inclined mind in which small physical details, such as that sailor’s twist-off head, get permanently lodged.

Wednesday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

‘Pray your boilers don’t fail’: the Church of England is in the grip of eco-zealots

It came to pass in 2020 that a decree went out from the General Synod that all the Church of England must be carbon net-zero by 2030. And this ruling was first made when Justin Welby was Archbishop of Canterbury. And all went to have a good hard look at their church heating systems, every one into his own vestry cupboard… How easy it is to issue a decree from on high; and how hard it is for the people on the ground to have to deal with its consequences.

Saturday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

John Power, Madeline Grant, Ysenda Maxtone-Graham, Calvin Po & Gus Carter

33 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: John Power examines the rise in drug abuse and homelessness on British streets; Madeline Grant explains the allure of Hollywood radical Sydney Sweeney; Ysenda Maxtone Graham laments the rise of the on-the-day party flake; Calvin Po warns of a war on Britain’s historic architecture; and Gus Carter reads his Notes on the brasserie chain Browns.

Thursday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

The rise of the on-the-day party drop-out

A new drinks-party-shirking method has taken hold in British society. I call it ‘Lastminute.non’. Previously, the way of not going to someone’s party was to write a polite message of refusal at least a week in advance, giving the host or hostess ample time to absorb the sad but inevitable fact that various friends would not be able to attend – usually for copper-bottomed reasons, such as that they had other plans for the evening or would be away on holiday. The new trend seems to be to accept an invitation, and then, mere hours before, to duck out of it. This means that from breakfast time onwards throughout the day of the party, the host will receive a steady stream of apologetic messages.

Tuesday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Dark secrets of the British housewife

Women and their guilty secrets; women and their innocent secrets; women and men’s secrets; women and state secrets; DNA tests busting women’s secrets – in her enticingly titled The Book of Revelations: Women and their Secrets, Juliet Nicolson comes at her subject from all possible angles. There is also a strongly feminist emphasis on wronged women across generations (Nicolson’s family included) who have somehow been coerced into keeping dark secrets by abusive men – or sometimes by abusive women. One such abusive woman was Phyllis Eliot, the headmistress of West Heath School, near Sevenoaks in Kent, during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Known as ‘P’, she used to kiss every girl goodnight in bed.

Thursday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Sir Nicholas Coleridge: ‘Girls at Eton? Never say never’

T he historic graffiti at Eton College, chiselled into its stone walls, wooden panelling and ancient oak desks, serves as a reminder to any Etonian that he’s merely the latest in a long line of boys stretching back to 1440 who have passed through the school and occasionally bent the rules. Two names chiselled together into a wall of the Cloisters are ‘H. COLERIDGE’ and ‘E. COLERIDGE’. ‘Not me!’ says Sir Nicholas Coleridge, Eton’s 43rd Provost, when I visit him on the last day of the summer term, ‘or any of my sons. They’re dated 1817, luckily, so we can’t be blamed.’ ‘The imposition of VAT has been a very damaging thing for education.

Thursday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

With glee to the silvery sea

Was it more profitable for an early-20th-century seaside railway poster to promise the undeliverable or to be slightly less enticing but at least tell the truth? In his charming and unashamedly train-spotterish book about how the British travelled to the seaside in the great days of rail, Andrew Martin quotes slogans from posters. The Great North of Scotland Railway described the Moray Firth as ‘the Scottish Riviera’. The Furness Railway named Grange-over-Sands ‘the Naples of the North!’ (The exclamation mark injected a smidgeon of doubt, Martin feels). More realistic companies toned down their boasts. The LNER decided it should go no further than claim it took passengers to ‘The Drier Side of Britain’. A North Eastern Railway poster proclaimed: ‘Scarborough Braces You Up.

Wednesday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Do we really need state-funded restaurants?

Two British cities, Dundee and Nottingham, have been chosen as trial sites for a new government scheme to be piloted next year: state-subsidised restaurants. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology has put up £1.5 million for the 12-month trial, initiated by the campaign group Nourish Scotland. If the restaurants are successful, they’ll be rolled out across Britain – nourishing us all – with a subsidised meal for £3. Inspired by second world war state-funded canteens, they’re going to be called ‘Public Diners’ – clever branding, with its quasi-American vibe.

Thursday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

The depressing rise of ‘direct cremations’

Twenty per cent of last year’s funerals in Britain were direct cremations – up from 14 per cent in 2020. Numbers are continuing to rise, fast, for this most affordable, clinical form of body disposal: cremations with no ceremony and no attendees. Daytime advertising campaigns put out by corporate firms such as Pure Cremation promote the peace of mind of sprightly 75-year-olds at their laptops, or in their conservatories with mugs of tea, who have just pre-paid for the direct cremation package. In the adverts they gush about the future family knees-up, with cupcakes and balloons, that their relatives will splash out on with the money saved by not paying for an attended funeral.

Thursday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Oxford’s LTN farce

Last week’s cheering news that the High Court has deemed Lambeth Council’s imposition of a Low Traffic Neighbourhood on West Dulwich ‘unlawful’, because they failed to take consultations with locals into sufficient account, has given a glimmer of hope to the benighted residents of Cowley in Oxford. In that once liveable outskirt, gridlock on the main roads caused by the imposition of the Cowley LTN has closed down previously thriving small businesses, so that, far from being the utopian ‘15-minute city’ dreamed up by councillors, residents can no longer walk to a printer, a post office or the Co-op. Driving to central Oxford takes ages, and it costs up to £17 to park on a meter for two hours. The buses are slow, expensive and unreliable.

Friday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Ian Williams, Philip Patrick, Guy Stagg, Ysenda Maxtone Graham, Mark Mason and Catriona Olding

37 min listen

On this week’s Spectator Out Loud: Ian Williams looks at Chinese influence in the UK (1:39); Philip Patrick interviews Japan’s last ninja (9:35); Guy Stagg reviews Damian Le Bas and explores the myths behind the city of Atlantis (18:23); Ysenda Maxtone Graham reviews an exhibition on school dinners at the Food Museum in Stowmarket (23:38); Mark Mason provides his notes on quizzes, ahead of the Spectator’s garden quiz (28:00); and, swapping Provence to visit family in America, Catriona Olding takes us on a trip up the east coast (31:27).  Produced and presented by Patrick Gibbons.

Thursday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Prepare to feel nauseous at this School Dinners exhibition

If your stomach turns when you walk past a Japanese restaurant with moulded plastic replicas of sushi on display, prepare to feel even more nauseous in the School Dinners exhibition at the Food Museum in Stowmarket, Suffolk. Here, moulded in that same plastic, in (if anything) even more garish colours, you’ll see a sample two-course school dinner from each decade from the 1940s to the 2020s. If orange PVC cod’s roe looks a bit disgusting, a heap of pale, lumpy, plastic 1970s mashed potato with over-boiled carrots is even worse. The sample plate from the 1940s contains chunks of dark brown liver polluting the inside of a jacket potato. (I’m not sure dinner ladies would have put liver inside a jacket potato in the 1940s.