Innovation: backwards evolution?

Richard Glover

Why, in various eateries, do they now insist on serving food on a wooden board? They don't seem to understand: the plate was invented for a reason. It's ceramic, therefore easy to clean, and has a lip around the edge, which stops things rolling off.

The wooden serving platter, strangely enough, appears to be chosen whenever they are serving food that has a tendency to roll. Sausages, gherkins, anything involving whole pickled onions: these are the ingredients that will cause mine host to sing out for a wooden board. Either he wants to set his waiters a challenge, or he's a part-owner of the dry cleaners next door.

It's a classic example of backwards evolution, the signs of which are all around us.

I've mentioned before the TV set, which is now so complex it's pretty much impossible to watch. Many surveys have pointed to the decline in viewing for free-to-air TV. Can I be the first to point out the obvious? It's because none of us can turn the damn thing on.

During the late afternoon, various young people pull all the plugs out of the back of the set, insert memory sticks of uncertain provenance, Wii consoles and joysticks, leaving a Gordian knot of cables on the floor. Stumbling towards the set at 10pm intending to watch Lateline, you need a torch, a manual and 2½ hours of trial and error.

The old TV was fine. You turned it on, clicked the dial either to position 10 (Number 96) or position 2 (the news) and after three seconds of warming up, either Abigail or James Dibble would hove into view.

The top of the set was also flat, allowing for the display of home ornaments. This in turn led to the classic dad joke:

Child: What's on the TV dad?

Dad: A pot plant and the TV guide. Are you blind?

This joke is now impossible to make. And so a perfectly good dad joke dies just to allow a bit of high-pixel action, which, if truth be told, just brings out everyone's blemishes. Why am I surprised?

With every innovation things get worse. Toothbrushes, now equipped with fat, non-slip handles, no longer fit into the holders built into every bathroom. This is, presumably, to reduce the number of toothbrush-slippage injuries plaguing hospitals. Instead, we contract cholera from leaving fat-bottomed toothbrushes out on the benchtop, marinating in a chain of toothpasty puddles.

Bucket seats have long replaced the bench seat in the front of cars, banishing the romance previously an essential part of motoring. Almost simultaneously, the Western world entered a period of long-term population decline, yet no one thinks to note the causal link.

Meanwhile, cameras with film in them have been replaced by mobile phones. Instead of taking a handful of meaningful pictures to be placed in an album to treasure, people take 6.7 million photos, mostly of their lunch, all of which will be lost in the great computer meltdown of 2017.

Admittedly, mobile phones have an upside. They have allowed a generation of young people to contact each other and plan mischief to get up to that very evening. The same device, alas, has also allowed their parents to ring them at random through the evening, preventing the aforementioned mischief. So again: evolution, backwards.

Underwear used to be comfortable, with both genders slipping on something large, usually made of white cotton and slightly grey from the wash. This wasn't very alluring, yet once you were both down to your knickers, plans were rarely derailed by mere undergarment aesthetics. Missing was that tight nylon trussing that is such a contributor to the fractious mood of our time. Comfortably gusseted, one was free to contemplate with equanimity those periods in which one found oneself untroubled by romance.

Further evidence of backwards evolution comes courtesy of the supermarket. They have removed the fish from behind the fish counter, instead placing it in tubs of ice out on the floor where people can breathe all over it. This is meant to promote the sensation you are in some sort of Naples street market, rather than trudging around Coles Birkenhead Point in the 20 minutes between your son's soccer game and your daughter's netball.

Here's the new method: point to the fish you want and the assistant comes from behind the counter, squats down wearily beside the metal bucket, lifts the fish into a bag while dripping water over the floor, then returns behind the counter to weigh the thing. Ah, progress.

Meanwhile, they've taken the green beans and the broccoli and put them on large platters in a process that can be described only as mysterious. If only they could also take all the tomatoes and serve them on wooden platters so they would tumble free and cover the whole floor in a sea of red. By running our trolleys through the resulting melee, we could create our own alfresco pasta sauce.

http://www.smh.com.au/comment/innovation-backwards-evolution-20130411-2hmbk.html

A heartfelt letter to my grieving mother and Maggie's great unknown quality - her human kindness

By Tom Utley

At my father’s funeral in 1988, Margaret Thatcher arrived more than an hour before the rest of the mourners. She took her place in a pew at the front of our parish church of  St Mary on Paddington Green in West London, sitting alone in the silence, her eyes on the altar.

Our friend the vicar told us later that he’d been taken aback to see the then prime minister there so early, asking her in great trepidation if somebody had given her the wrong time. Her reply has gone down in Utley family history.

‘No,’ she said, ‘I just didn’t want my arrival to upstage the widow.’

After a week in which all the papers have carried page after page of Thatcher coverage, I can imagine that even some of her most fervent fans may be wanting to read about something else. To them, I apologise for what follows.

It’s just that, in all the millions of words of eulogy from the Right and ignorant rants from the Left, one aspect of this extraordinary woman’s character has often been overlooked.

And after the immense kindnesses she showed my family in our bereavement, I feel it would be simply wrong of me to let her own death pass without recording what I know of it.

The quality I mean was her profound thoughtfulness for others — and particularly for people who, in the great scheme of things, couldn’t be said to count for much. This went beyond perfect manners, which can be taught, to a deeper form of fellow-feeling, which cannot.

Norman Lamont, the former chancellor, touched on it in his affectionate tribute in the Lords on Wednesday, when he said that Lady Thatcher seemed ‘compassionate about drivers, secretaries and doorkeepers — but not about ministers’.

And nobody had any trouble believing him when he added that she had once called him ‘utterly hopeless’.

My favourite story about the Lady, which illustrates the point perfectly, is of the grand Chequers dinner at which a nervous waitress dropped a bowl full of scalding soup into the lap of one of the guests (my increasingly unreliable memory tells me the diner in question was Sir Geoffrey Howe; but it was somebody very important, whoever it was).

As the diner whimpered in agony, a horrified Mrs T leaped from her chair, rushed round the table and gave a huge, comforting hug to....  the waitress.

Immediately and instinctively, she understood who was suffering most in that room — and it wasn’t the dignitary with the scalded crotch, whose whimpers she ignored.

I must admit that I wasn’t there, and so can’t testify to the truth of the story.

But it squares so completely with dozens of similar accounts of her kindnesses to little people (whom she would never in a million years have regarded as such) that I believe it. It certainly tallies with my own family’s experience after my father’s death, for which I can vouch absolutely.

Now, I’m not claiming for one moment that anyone would describe the blind journalist and sage T.E. ‘Peter’ Utley, as one of the little people.

As I may just conceivably have mentioned before, Lady Thatcher herself was to call my father ‘the most distinguished Tory thinker of his generation’.

With her love of ideas, she relished his company, the clarity of his mind and his readiness to argue with her (which, as an old-school Tory, suspicious of ‘radicalism’, he often did — though they agreed over much more than they disagreed).

He also helped with some of her most famous speeches.

As I’ve certainly mentioned before, he may even have had a hand in her famous observation that ‘there’s no such thing as society’ — a remark whose meaning has been turned on its head by her thicker enemies (including Nick Clegg, in his fatuous Commons ‘tribute’ to her this week) ever since she uttered it in 1987.

What these twits never cite is the sentence that followed: ‘There are individual men and women and there are families; and no government can do anything except through people.’

But it wasn’t my father of whom Lady Thatcher first thought when he died, aged 67, on Midsummer’s Day, 1988. It was of my housewife mother, whom she had met only rarely.

That day, the prime minister was in Toronto for a G7 summit, discussing international economic policy with leaders including Ronald Reagan, Helmut Kohl, Francois Mitterrand, Noboru Takeshita of Japan and European Commission President Jacques Delors.

Yet before she went to bed, she found time to write a long and moving letter to my mother — four or five pages, in her own hand, woman to woman — praising my father and offering her love and prayers.

A diplomatic messenger delivered it to our flat in London the next morning, producing it from a bag emblazoned with the royal arms.

It was quite the grandest thing that had ever happened to us. And it meant more to my mother than I can say.

I’ve often wondered what Presidents Reagan or Mitterrand would have thought if they’d poked their heads round Lady Thatcher’s door the previous night and asked her what she was working on.

At a time like that, would any other world leader have felt an immediate, compassionate duty to comfort the widow of an occasional speechwriter?

We were amazed, too, when she re-arranged her schedule to come to the funeral, on a day she had to fly to Paris for another summit. Indeed, she went straight from the church to the airport, leaving without any attempt to draw attention to herself, with just a few words to my mother, a handshake for the vicar and a sympathetic nod to me and the rest of the family.

One final, thoughtful touch: her car had got ahead of the funeral cortege as we left for the crematorium. So she told her driver to pull over and let us pass, while her police outriders waved us through the red lights to take the path they had cleared for her. The second grandest moment of our lives, in the space of a week.

But her kindness didn’t stop there. Not only did she come to my father’s memorial service, where she read a lesson, but she offered herself as patron of his memorial fund, appearing at several of its prizegivings over the years. Her thoughtfulness to my mother wasn’t a one-off, but a commitment for life.

She also planted a tree in my father’s memory, at a private ceremony at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire.

But so petty and vile are her enemies that, when they saw her name on the plaque soon afterwards, vandals dug it up and destroyed it.

I know that, by now, many of those enemies will be spitting with rage at me.

It’s all very well being kind to waitresses and the bereaved families of friends, they’ll say, but, ‘What about the miners?’

To which I can only answer that they know, as well as anyone else, that no matter whose hand signed the death warrant, it was economics that killed the mines. It was simply unsustainable to go on asking taxpayers to pay men to destroy their lungs, a mile underground, digging out coal that was worth pounds less per ton than it cost to extract.

But quite enough ink has been wasted on the disgusting displays of rejoicing over Lady Thatcher’s death by the ignorant exhibitionists of the Left.

The fact is they don’t hate the real Margaret Thatcher, the great and good woman who did more than any peacetime prime minister for the ordinary people of Britain, whom she cared about and believed in so passionately.

Indeed, they know nothing of her, refusing even to think about what she did for her country, since myth and caricature suit their argument better than the truth.

What they are actually ranting at is her Spitting Image puppet — and that just makes them look profoundly stupid.


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2307712/A-heartfelt-letter-grieving-mother-Maggies-great-unknown-quality--human-kindness.html

Tristan da Cunha

It is the world's most remote group of islands, 6,173 miles from Britain, and has more birds and penguins than human residents.

But there is one thing missing from the lives of the Tristan da Cunha islanders - it cannot find a vicar to give them spiritual guidance.

The volcanic British territory in the South Atlantic has been without a parish priest since Father Chris Brown left in 2010.

The post has been advertised several times, according to the Church Times, but so far no one has agreed to make their home 1,750 miles from the nearest landmass of Africa.

Now the residents, who number 262, could have a woman as their next priest as the Cape Town diocese steps up its attempts to fill the vacancy.

Lorna Lavarello-Smith,  who was born on the island, is training in Peterborough to be a priest and is helping the search.

She is and is due to be ordained this summer before serving a curacy in Northamptonshire.

Ms Lavarello-Smith, the descendant of Italian Gaetano Lavarello, who was shipwrecked on the island in 1892, hopes to return to live on Tristan da Cunha 'one day', the Independent on Sunday reported,

She described the island as a 'very special' place in which to serve, adding: 'If you are looking for a ministry where you want to be close to God and close to nature, then Tristan da Cunha is the place for you.

'There is something about being in the middle of the South Atlantic Ocean, reliant on a community of people with whom you live. You hear the sound of God's voice much more clearly.'

According to Tristan da Cunha's website, the new vicar of St Mary's will ideally play a musical instrument and teach at the school.

The advert said: 'Applicants should be active and energetic. A keen interest in church music and the ability to play an instrument would be an asset.'

Tristan da Cunha is a close-knit community with just seven surnames among its inhabitants, but some of its priests have found life depressing and lonely there.

The Reverend Edwin H Dodgson, younger brother of writer Lewis Carroll, grew so unhappy at the 'unnatural state of isolation' he told of his despair four years after arriving as a teacher and missionary in 1880.  He wrote: 'It has been my daily prayer that God would open up some way for us all to leave ...There is not the slightest reason for this island to be inhabited at all.'

There was a 13-year time lapse between a vicar's appointment when the Rev Graham Barrow quit the island in 1909.

The archipelago, first sighted in 1506, consists of the main island of Tristan da Cunha itself, which measures about seven miles across. Settlers arrived in 1810. It has an area of 37.8 sq miles, along with the uninhabited Nightingale Islands and the wildlife reserves of Inaccessible Island and Gough Island.

There is no airport and only nine ships are scheduled to visit from Cape Town, the nearest major port. Television arrived only in 2001, but there are only two terrestrial channels.

During World War Two, It  was used as a listening post to monitor German ships while the entire population was evacuated from 1961-63 over a threatened volcano eruption.


 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2305229/Wanted-Vicar-worlds-remote-parish---thousands-miles-London-262-residents.html

Protestants 'work harder' and their mental wellbeing is more affected when they are unemployed

People in Protestant countries work harder because they feel guiltier about taking time off, a study has found.

And while unemployment generally makes all people unhappy, it is twice as likely seriously to affect the mental wellbeing of Protestants as those of other denominations.

The findings suggest that the economic downturn may have had a far more serious effect on people in Britain than other countries, with joblessness more likely to have led to depression among Christian workers.

Scientists from Holland studied more than 150,000 people in 82 countries to find out whether there was any truth behind the notion of a Protestant work ethic.

The countries deemed historically Protestant by the researchers, from Groningen University, included the UK, the US Australia, Germany, Holland, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Latvia, Estonia, South Africa and Zimbabwe.

They found those who were unemployed in all countries said they were less happy when out of work, regardless of religious denomination, but this was exacerbated among those in Protestant countries.

In fact, Protestants are generally 40 per cent less happy when unemployed than others, they reported.

Researchers took into account a number of factors which could have skewed results - such as marital status, age, gender, income, education and health.

Dutch economist Dr André van Hoorn, who led the study, said: ‘The negative effect of unemployment on self-reported happiness was twice as strong for Protestants compared with non-Protestants.

‘We found that the work ethic does exist and that individual Protestants and historically Protestant societies appear to value work much more than others.

‘At the individual level, unemployment hurts Protestants much more than it does non-Protestants. Protestantism causes a stronger work ethic.

‘Interestingly, it is not so much Protestant individuals who are hurt more by being unemployed as it is individuals - both Protestants and non-Protestants - living in Protestant societies.’

He added that the results supported sociologist Max Weber’s idea that a strong work ethic is something which has evolved from historical Protestantism, rather than contemporary interpretations of Protestantism.

Weber first came up with the notion of a Protestant work ethic in 1904, suggesting that the religious concept of achieving God-given grace through frugality and working hard was one of the crucibles of capitalism.

Despite the theory being widely accepted since, the Dutch researchers sought to test it.

Cary Cooper, Professor of Organisational Psychology and Health at Lancaster University, said the study ‘shows that the Protestant work ethic is alive and kicking’.

He added: ‘It was very evident during the Thatcher and Blair years and the current coalition emphasis on the negative aspects of benefits are also evidence of it.

‘It is very much a cultural thing. In the UK, for example, people work for achievement; in the US, with fewer safety nets - no redundancy [pay] for example - fear is likely a driver.

‘I think 2008 made some differences. People who had followed the work ethic for years found themselves without a job. All the sacrifices - working long hours, not seeing the kids - had not worked out.

'We may find that’s damaged the work ethic and people are putting less focus on work and more on a balance between work and the rest of their life.’

 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2305566/Protestants-work-harder-mental-wellbeing-affected-work.html

Journal article:  http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167268113000838

Mr Osborne looks like a French aristo in a powdered wig. But that's no reason to put on this prolier than thou routine

Tom Utley offers some thoughts on the British class system

Whenever I see George Osborne on the telly, I remember a friend’s brilliant observation that he always looks like an aristocrat in a powdered wig, peering nervously through his carriage window at the Parisian mob on the eve of the French Revolution.

Indeed, the poor man has about him a permanent air of haughty disdain for his fellow man, mixed with a touch of cruelty and a hint of fear.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that the Chancellor actually suffers from any of these character defects. In private life, for all I know, he may be as lovable, fearless and free from hauteur as the Andrex puppy.

All my friend was saying is that when the Good Lord was distributing facial features, He unkindly kitted out young George Gideon Oliver Osborne with those of a supercilious grandee of the ancien regime. He might have added that He gave him a voice to match the face — with a thin, reedy quality and a fastidious accent, suggestive of a childhood spent whining at liveried footmen.

Whatever the truth may be about the inner Gideon, as his family called him in his youth, it has long been apparent that for a politician of the 21st century, he has a bit of an image problem. Clearly, he thinks so himself, because this week, as anyone who heard his speech on welfare reform will confirm, he tried to do something about it.

Not the face, of course. There’s not much a bloke can do about that, short of plastic surgery or growing a beard. But he made a very noticeable effort to adjust the accent, attempting to bring it a notch or two down the social scale by elaborately dropping his tees and aitches and flicking in other touches of Estuary English.

‘Wod I wanna torkta you abah .....’ he began, before getting on to his message that ‘hard-working people who wanna ge’ on in life are gonna be bedderoff’.

If you missed it, and can be bothered, you can catch the whole thing on YouTube and make up your own mind about how far he succeeded in presenting himself as a man of the people. But if you want my opinion, the experiment was not a happy one.



To me, he came across like nothing so much as an 18th-century French aristocrat on the steps of the guillotine, mounting a desperately unconvincing last-minute attempt to persuade the mob that he was really on their side. Indeed, I thought his efforts to sound prolier-than-thou drew attention to his poshness, rather than playing it down.

Of course, Mr Osborne is far from the only British politician who has tried to endear himself to an audience by disguising an accent redolent of privilege.

Perhaps the supreme vocal chameleon is Tony Blair, who will slip from a light Scottish brogue for an audience in Edinburgh to a mid-Atlantic twang for the Yanks — and from Mitford to mockney, depending on whether he is addressing officer cadets at Sandhurst or young offenders in Shoreditch.

But in a strange sort of way, the former Prime Minister’s Rory Bremner act is less jarring than Mr Osborne’s — and not only because Mr Blair is better at it.

My own paradoxical theory is that he gets away with it more successfully because, in switching from one accent to another, he is being completely true to himself. For I’ve always thought the most remarkable feature of the real Anthony Charles Lynton Blair is that there isn’t one, and never was. The man is a fake, through and through, a chameleon to the shallow depths of his nature.

On the other hand, there is a real George Osborne, rooted firmly in a distinctive social class. The trouble is that the mockney-speaking persona he adopted on Tuesday, at Morrisons supermarket distribution centre in Kent, wasn’t him.

True, a survey this week found that more than a fifth of Britons admit to altering our natural accents — whether to sound more posh, like Hyacinth Bucket and the late Woy Jenkins, or less so, like most of the Queen’s grandchildren. But voters still tend to be suspicious of politicians who try to disown their class backgrounds.

If my theory is right, it may go a long way towards explaining why Boris Johnson’s poshness has never stood much in the way of his popularity. For say what you like about my old colleague, what you hear is what you get.

Like David Cameron, he has never made the slightest attempt to disguise the fact he comes from an upper-middle-class background and went to the poshest school in the world. Indeed, my only slight doubt about his accent is the mystery of how anyone below the rank of Duke could genuinely be as posh as Boris sounds.

What is certain is that the niceties and gradations of the Britain class system — with its animosities and snobberies, whether inverted or otherwise — have exerted an endless (and, let’s face it, unhealthy) fascination for the people of these islands through the ages.

Without them, most of our greatest novelists, from Austen and Trollope to P.G. Wodehouse, would have had trouble finding anything to write about, while many a wedding reception would have passed off with a great deal less ill-feeling between the families of the bride and the groom.

Of course, attitudes to class have long been changing. Indeed, one great irony about Mr Osborne is that if he’d actually been around in the 18th century to which his face belongs, snobs would have thought him a frightful oik. This is because his father, though the 17th Baronet, is in the interior decorating trade (Osborne & Little is the family firm), while young Gideon himself went to the least posh of the three great London public schools.

After all (and do agree, my dear) his alma mater St Paul’s has always ranked socially behind my own old school, Westminster —and a poor third to that production line of cads and bounders, Harrow. Yet today, even the most crashing snobs seem to regard Mr Osborne and his background as ineffably posh.

But then nothing was ever simple about our class system. And now the BBC has teamed with a group of academics to complicate it further, by inventing seven new gradations of social class — ranging from ‘elite’ at the top to ‘precariat’ at the bottom — and inviting us all to test which we belong to by answering a questionnaire online.

It seems to me a pretty pointless exercise, with more to do with income than class. And it will surprise nobody to discover that Mr Osborne falls squarely among the elite. But then so do some three million others (including, apparently, me — though our four sons, all fluent mockney speakers, with highly precarious futures, come out second from bottom as ‘emergent service workers’).

Now, I have to admit that I understand why Mr Osborne sought to disguise his class on Tuesday. After all, he was trying to spread the message that it’s wrong for people who are capable of working to live off the labour of others. And hasn’t he only to enunciate his natural vowels to indicate that he’s well used to benefiting from other’s efforts, through a trust fund or two?

But here’s the final irony: when he says that idleness should never pay better than work, he is striking a chord that resonates from top to bottom of the class system. Indeed, polls show that the public’s hostility to over-generous welfare benefits is at its loudest in the BBC’s three poorest categories — traditional working class, emergent service workers and precariat.

For once, he has a message that will appeal to the great mass of voters — in fact, it may yet prove an election winner — and there’s really no need to deliver it in an unnatural voice.

In my book, Mr Osborne deserves huge credit for sticking to his economic strategy. If he takes my advice, he’ll stick to his true accent, too.

SOURCE

Bach

Ivan Hewett

There are certain areas of feeling that classical music does especially well. One of them is the sense that everything will be all right, that there is order underneath the chaos, that peace will win out over rage and darkness. Let’s call it consolation.

It’s found most often in religious music, but not only there. And even when there are consoling words, there’s something in the music itself which redeems the mess of this world, even if we don’t believe in the words.

No composer expresses this mysterious feeling more powerfully than Bach, which may be why he appeals so much to unbelievers like me. Many things conspire to produce that feeling. It’s partly that so much later classical music springs out of Bach, so listening to him feels like going home. There’s also the sense that the music is obeying deep laws which spring out of the nature of music itself. Nobody invented them, they just exist. And finally there’s the sense that the crystalline order of Bach is rooted in simple everyday things – the rhythms of breathing and dancing, and sturdy common chords.

SOURCE

Nest feels a little emptier after family ties fortified by floodwaters

A tale from Brisbane's big flood by John Henningham

OF COURSE you must stay with us, I assured my suddenly homeless son. For as long as it takes to rebuild.

Which could be weeks, I thought, looking at the muddied wreck that had been home for the family of four.

We'd seized as many of their possessions as we could, splashing through the rapidly rising waters in our little convoy - cars and a truck bursting with mattresses, fridge, clothes and fluffy toys. A team of touch football mates helped load and disappeared just as rapidly to help other families.

Then the waiting, on that fine and sunny January day, eerily free of portents of the rising catastrophe. Within hours all access was cut off and the broadcast warnings were increasingly grim.

By the end of the day, the slab beneath our high-set Queenslander looked like a bazaar, with son's and a neighbour's chairs, rugs, fridges, beds, cupboards and linen jammed together.

But then the waters receded, and after another day we finally saw our son's house. And saw his heartbreak. Everything inside and out was coated in the drying black muck left behind by the river, its stench filling our nostrils.

The kitchen clock was frozen at 26 past six, witness to the moment the waters had reached halfway up the walls, before rising above the ceiling.

And suddenly the clean-up was on, like a pitched battle. Friends and family were joined by dozens of robust volunteers. The footpath looked like a long garbage tip. Water tankers hosed the slimy mud off the road while trucks picked up the rubbish.

The street took on a carnival atmosphere, with sausage sizzles, drinks and ice creams, everyone helping each other. It was Brisbane at its finest.

The house ended as a skeleton, a framework of studs, joists and trusses, but with the outer boards and tiled roof intact. We settled into a new life - empty nesters no longer. The fledglings sent off by the parent birds had returned with chicks of their own.

There were sympathetic looks from old friends. "It must be difficult," murmured one. They saw my cheerful denials as lacking credibility, perhaps because they knew how grouchy and difficult men of a certain age can become. We'd allocated the little family two rooms plus the second bathroom. Yet over the months there seemed to be a gradual encroachment. The carpets in living areas were colonised by toy cars and trucks, a doll's house, blocks and a train table.

Our bathroom had the house's only bath, so it became a home for rubber duckies, turtles and tiny boats. I'd often find the toilet had a little insert in the seat. The backyard soon had a sandpit and play castle, plus scooter, balls and Tonka truck. Soon it seemed we were confined to two rooms, while the young family had the rest. But story-time and goodnight kisses were a boost - something grandparents normally don't get to experience every day.

Our grandson Patrick turned three during their stay. He delighted in nicknames, had renamed Gran as Nan, and now the tongue-twister of Grandpa was simplified to Punka. I got to like that name.

But it wasn't easy for the young parents, suddenly thrown into a role of dependency while trying to manage their family as well as do their jobs and part-time study, on top of dealing with all the complications of rebuilding and applying for flood funds.

Buttressing the young family was the support from friends and strangers who didn't forget and kept pitching in. Gifts of toys, furniture and clothing poured through our doors. An acquaintance sent a huge hamper of goodies, while meals, cakes and drinks kept arriving from myriad friends.

Very generous cash gifts were quietly and often anonymously dropped in. A former student in Japan sent a donation, little knowing his own country was just weeks away from a far more terrible devastation. And ongoing labour was at hand to get the major reconstruction started, led by my son's parents-in-law.

Surplus gifts of furniture were distributed back and forth between other families in the street, until finally anything extra was packed off to the serious flood victims at Grantham.

A week or so after the flood, the muddied kitchen clock began ticking again. Surely a good sign.

After months when nothing much seemed to happen, a flurry of professional building activity after the flood funds came through meant the house was ready to be lived in again. And so the little family left us, 7 1/2 months after the January disaster.

It was disturbingly quiet and still the first morning after they'd gone. No happy babbling of baby chatter or toddlers' yells and laughter.

No toys being trundled up and down the hallway. No little boy waking us at dawn to ask if we'd play. No calling to order from the parents. No big pot of porridge on the stove.

A dreadful hush that made the place seem lonely. Carpets lay sadly bare, deprived of their toys and kiddie furniture. It was all too quiet and neat.

A couple of days later, as we visited the little family and I looked around at their beautifully restored house, my grandson begged us to stay longer. We realised he was missing us, too.

I told him we had to go back to our house, but we'd be seeing him and his sister often. He threw his arms around me and gave me a tight hug. "I love you Punka," he said. Not entirely a bad flood.

http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/opinion/nest-feels-a-little-emptier-after-family-ties-fortified-by-floodwaters/story-e6frerdf-1226243303361

So Jacob, did you really go canvassing in a Bentley with your nanny? No! It was mummy's Mercedes: JANE FRYER meets the poshest man in politics

The honourable member for Somerset North East, Jacob Rees-Mogg, is enjoying a bit of a purple patch.

He has recently been described as a ‘mini Boris’ and the ‘undisputed star of the backbenches’, constantly perking up dreary Commons sessions with his brilliant speeches and wonderfully dry humour (often in Latin) and sitting (very elegantly) back down to cries of ‘More! More!’ from both sides of the chamber.

Quite a feat considering 43-year-old Jacob — second youngest child of the late Sir William Rees-Mogg — must be the poshest man in politics, alternately known as The Mogg, a Bertie Wooster throwback, ‘David Cameron’s worst nightmare’ and ‘the honourable member for the early 20th century’.

He is so unashamedly upper-class he’s rumoured to wear wing-collared pyjamas in bed, has never knowingly been seen in casual clothes and, at Tory Party conferences, tethers his plastic security pass to an elegant gold watch chain.

He has also been surgically attached to his briefcase since his first day at Eton and, during the 1997 General Election, took his nanny canvassing during his failed bid to win the safe Labour stronghold of Central Fife.

Of late, he’s caused quite a stir by commuting from his home in Mayfair (he also has a rather lovely pile in Somerset) to Westminster in a grey 1968 Bentley that he bought at auction for £8,000 when he was just 22.

‘I usually drive my Lexus around town, but it’s been broken recently. In fact,’ he adds with a joyful cry, ‘I’ve got two Bentleys — the 1968 one and a 1936 model.’

And, er, which Bentley did he and Nanny take canvassing in Fife in 1997?

‘Oh, no. That was wrong. Well, the Nanny bit is right. Of course she came canvassing; she’s part of the family after all — she’s been with us 47 years. But we took my mother’s Mercedes Estate. I don’t think a Bentley’s a suitable campaigning car. As much as anything it was the petrol consumption: six miles to the gallon.’

In the flesh, as he dollops clotted cream and jam onto his scone in the House of Commons tea room, Jacob is just as posh as you’d expect, indescribably polite and old-fashioned, very young looking and extremely funny and self-deprecating (‘Oh no, my Latin is awful — I just know a few useful phrases’), despite clearly being terrifyingly clever.

This is, after all, the man who last year stunned the House when he casually dropped the word ‘floccinaucinihilipilification’ into a debate on the remuneration of EU staff.

He’s always been bright — aged eight he was reading the FT and playing the stock market with the help of a £50 inheritance from a distant uncle. Nanny telephoned his broker on his behalf.

One Eton contemporary recalls him as ‘immaculately turned out, and with a brain so large you could almost see it throbbing’.

Aged 11, he had turned the £50 into £3,500 and was terrorising the City with regular appearances at company AGMs. At one GEC shareholders’ meeting, he castigated the chairman about the company’s ‘pathetic dividend’.

Soon, he was giving regular interviews to the media, telling the public about his plan to be ‘a millionaire at 20, a multi-millionaire at 40 and Prime Minister at 70, when I’ve made enough money to be able to afford to waste some on politics’.

In a moment of frivolity, he revealed that he loved Cadbury’s Creme Eggs, had made three wills and was obsessed with Dallas. And that the people he’d most like to meet were: ‘Margaret Thatcher, the Queen, Geoffrey Boycott and Larry Hagman, in that order.’

Thirty years on, he hasn’t made much progress.  ‘Of the four, I’ve only met one of them — Margaret Thatcher. And Larry Hagman’s dead.’

What, not even the Queen? ‘No! I was supposed to meet her the other day at Buckingham Palace.  I went in the Bentley because I thought you should go in a proper car if you’re meeting the Queen, but she was ill, so I missed her by a whisker.’

After his 1997 defeat in Fife — where he canvassed tirelessly and enthusiastically and won 9 per cent of the vote — he tried again in 2001, losing The Wrekin in Shropshire to Labour’s Peter Bradbury, and later failed to be selected in the fantastically posh London borough of Kensington and Chelsea for ‘lacking the common touch’.

But in 2010 it all finally came good in Somerset North East, where his family has lived for centuries.  ‘The party hierarchy didn’t want me to be the candidate,’ he says. ‘The timing was unfortunate — they’d just launched a  big thing to change the image  of candidates and then they immediately selected me.’

Which is why, he maintains, he’ll ‘never, ever, ever’ be offered a place in David Cameron’s Cabinet.  ‘I had more chance of becoming the new Pope. Though I don’t think my wife would be very happy if I became Pope.’

It must be a bit frustrating — to be stuck on the backbenches, with his enormous brain and all that energy courtesy of seven coffees a day and endless Creme Eggs (yes, still).

‘No, no, no! I love being on the backbenches. My office is the size of a broom cupboard, but I’m right in the thick of it. And I’m much freer. For example, I can say to you that I’d love the Tories to do a deal with UKIP, whereas ministers can’t really say things like that.’

So what does he think of Nigel Farage? ‘I think he’s one of the ablest politicians around and says things — a great deal of which, but not everything — I agree with.’

Would he be tempted to defect?  ‘No! Never, never, never! I was born a Conservative and I shall die a Conservative.’ He has certainly remained impressively committed. At Eton, where he was frequently teased (‘in a nice, jolly way — I still am, and I most likely deserve it’), he was once sent out of class for sporting a large Tory rosette during the 1983 General Election.

‘It’s pretty sad, isn’t it, that the most serious, worst, naughtiest thing that I’ve ever done is wearing a Tory rosette in class? In fact, no! I got sent out twice at Eton,’ he says, looking pleased. ‘The second time was for an argument with a beak [teacher] over the infallibility of the papacy. I seem to recall mine was a very hardline view.’ Jacob is a committed Roman Catholic.

After Eton came Trinity College, Oxford, and then a very successful career as an investment banker. He still works 30 days a year for Somerset Capital Management for a reputed £10,000 a month, presumably to service the Bentleys.

Not renowned as a ladies’ man, everyone was a bit surprised when he met and, in 2007, married Helena de Chair, daughter of the late, very rich Somerset de Chair and the former Juliet, Marchioness of Bristol.

‘We met at a campaign for a referendum on the EU constitution, as you do. And then we met a few times subsequently, and here we are — four children later.’

He proposed in front of one of her mother’s five Van Dykes. (Apparently the two Stubbses were on loan to a gallery. According to a friend, the engagement was lengthened at Juliet’s request until they were returned so the wedding guests could admire them.)

Of course, there’s no disputing Jacob is, well, different. Some people have questioned whether anyone could really be like that, or if he is playing up to the public perception of him.

‘I’m just me,’ he insists. ‘I just carry on doing what I’ve always been doing.’

There are so many (presumably) apocryphal stories doing the rounds that I ask if I can run through a few and see which, if any, are true.

‘Of course! What fun. Why not?’

OK, here goes . . . did he, or did he not ever pay a boy at Eton to shield him with an umbrella on a cross-country run?

‘No. I wish I had. What a good idea!’

Did Nanny and his maid really take turns to stand behind him shielding his neck from the sun at Glyndebourne with a book?

‘That’s true, though I’m afraid I can’t remember which book it was.’

Did he and the King of Spain have sole access to an exclusive hidden upstairs loo at Claridges?

‘Yes! You can’t have too many people using a special loo or it’s no longer special — but it’s now a disabled loo, so anyone can use it.’

Does he dress for dinner at home?

‘Not every night, no. And not on my own. And, yes, the ladies do leave when the port comes in.’

Does he possess a pair of jeans?

‘No I don’t! What on earth would I do with them?’

Is his favourite food still Cadbury’s Creme Eggs.

‘Oh, I love Creme Eggs. And ready salted crisps — my ideal supper.’

Did he try to change the last four digits of his phone number to 1649, the date of the execution of Charles I, to make it more memorable?

‘I didn’t try to, I did.’

And finally, did his wife, Helena, really sport a tongue stud when they met?

‘Yes she did! She got rid of it when our eldest, Peter, was born. She thought mothers ought not to have tongue studs.’

Gosh, was it a bit, well, startling when he first encountered it?

‘Oh, goodness! I think she told me before I, er, spotted it.’

We both go pink. Presumably he doesn’t have any piercings himself?

‘No, not so far. And not any tattoos either — yet. I’m still waiting for my rebellious stage.’

Yes, Jacob is 43 going on 60, but that’s half his charm. He’s also kind, courteous, hard-working and unfailingly patient when faced with a raft of silly questions.

Despite his penchant for nannies, Bentleys, ridiculous private loos and preposterous poshness, I’d love him to be my MP.

Unlike David Cameron, I’d love him and his throbbing brain to be in the Cabinet. In fact, forget that — Jacob Rees-Mogg for Prime Minister!

 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2295489/So-Jacob-did-really-canvassing-Bentley-nanny-No-It-mummys-Mercedes-JANE-FRYER-meets-poshest-man-politics.html

The flood dog that miraculously came back to life

A southeast Queensland council is putting out a call for anybody who recognises this plucky pooch to get in touch.
The series of images released today were sent to Somerset Regional Council, to the west of Brisbane, for inclusion in a commemorative book of photos documenting stories of recovery from the 2011 floods.
Two show what appears to be a bloated, muddy and lifeless staffy-cross lying in a field.


When first found lying in a field, the dog was bloated, muddy and lifeless. A third shows a person hosing off the unfortunate animal, as it becomes more recognisable.
A final instalment in the series shows the newly-clean dog, smiling happily for the camera.
Council plans to use the photographs in its book The Somerset Story, documenting the region's flood recovery, if it can identify the dog's owner or the person in the picture.

As this person hosed the dog down, it gradually became recognisable.

Somerset Regional Council flood recovery officer Jane Williamson said the dog had won over everybody involved in the production.
"The photographs tell an amazing story of a dog that truly looks like it's had its day," she said.
"It's quite amazing that the dog survived the floods when you look at the earlier photos of it bloated and lying in the grass.


Finally from bloated, muddy and lifeless, the pooch staged a miraculous return from the dead, cracking a smile for the camera. If you recognise this dog or the person hosing it down, contact Somerset Regional Council.

UPDATE:  Apparently the doggy was just enjoying a roll in the mud -- as doggies sometimes do.

http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/lazarus-like-revival-of-tika-the-dead-dog-gets-hosed-down-by-owner-vivien-macbeth/story-e6freoof-1226599335627

A 1956 Armstrong Siddeley Star Sapphire

Complete with suicide doors

I always admired them in their day.

'I'm keeping all four!' What this courageous mother replied when butcher NHS doctors said: Sacrifice two of your quads to save the others

How will the boys feel when they learn that the NHS wanted to  kill two of them?

Pregnant with quadruplets, Emma Robbins was told again and again that she should terminate two of her babies to give the others a better chance of survival.

Again and again, she told doctors she had no intention of sacrificing any of her boys, who were conceived naturally at odds of 750,000 to one.

Now she has all the proof she needed that her instinct was right: four happy, healthy and utterly adorable one-year-olds.
The quadruplets from left to right, Sammy Robbins, Zachary, Joshua and Reuben Robbins

The healthy quadruplets from left to right, Sammy, Zachary, Joshua and Reuben Robbins at home. Mother Emma Robbins was advised to consider terminating two to save the other two during her pregnancy

Zachary, Joshua, Reuben and Sam had their first birthday party yesterday. The brothers are even more remarkable because they were born on February 29 last year – at odds of 3.5million to one – so will celebrate their true birthday only once every four years.

Mrs Robbins, 31, and her husband Martin, 39, already had a son, three-year-old Luke, when they tried for what they thought would be their second child.

Mrs Robbins said: ‘Never in a million years did we think we’d have four babies at once. I’d be lying if I said it was easy, but we’re so glad we never gave up on our babies.’

She added: ‘At ten weeks I was a lot larger than I’d been with Luke and I was suffering from horrendous morning sickness. I was worried that something might be wrong.

‘The sonographer looked at both of us wide-eyed, turned the screen to us, then said she could see three amniotic sacs and not just two babies but four. And not just quads but identical twins as well.’

Mrs Robbins said her husband, a sign-maker, ‘looked numb and just laughed’. The next time they visited St Michael’s Hospital in Bristol, the consultant congratulated them – but then warned the couple they should consider terminating some or all of the babies.  ‘He told us the risks were so high it would put me in danger and the babies too,’ she said.

‘He said we had three options. We could terminate the pregnancy, reduce the pregnancy by terminating some of the embryos, or carry on. Instinctively I clutched my bump. An overwhelming sense of love rushed through me and I told him that we were keeping all four of them.’

The former project manager, who lives in Bristol, said the same advice was given after her 12-week scan.

She said: ‘I’d just been scanned and had been told everything looked fine but now he was pointing out the risks again and asking me to consider aborting the twins for the sake of the other two. I was beginning to feel pressured and it didn’t feel fair. We’d already made our decision.

‘All our babies were doing well. We’d seen their tiny outlines on the screen and we’d already begun to think of them individually.’  Once again, at 16 weeks into the pregnancy, the couple were told to consider aborting the twins. Mrs Robbins said: ‘By now I felt under immense pressure and I was getting angry.

‘Each time I went to the hospital it was all about the risks and asking me to consider aborting the twins to save the other two babies. But I knew that each time I looked at my surviving babies I’d also be thinking about the ones I’d lost. The thought of it broke my heart.’

At Mrs Robbins’s 18-week scan the consultant warned her again, saying 20 weeks would be the last time a termination or selective reduction would be possible.

She said: ‘By now we’d found out that all our babies were boys and as soon as he’d finished I told him it wasn’t an option and that was final.

‘We didn’t know how we’d manage financially and practically but I felt it must have happened for a reason. I decided I’d do everything in my power to give birth to four healthy babies.’

On February 29 last year, two months before her due date, Mrs Robbins went into labour. Reuben was the first to be delivered by caesarean section, weighing 2lb 14oz, followed by  Zachary, 2lb 8oz, and his twin Joshua, 3lb 1oz, and finally Sam, 2lb 13oz.

After two months in hospital, the boys, whom Mrs Robbins calls her ‘little miracle Peter Pans’ were strong enough to be taken home – where they soon made their presence felt. She said: ‘Each night the babies would wake up one after the other and start screaming, which would wake Luke up too.

‘We had to turn our lounge into the nursery and would take in turns to sleep down there. With four breastfeeds to coordinate every four hours, day and night, as well as bottles, 30 nappy changes and endless baths, life was exhausting.’

And as the boys get bigger, so do the challenges. Mrs Robbins said: ‘When they’re all in the buggy together it weighs ten stone. Pushing it is a serious workout.’

SOURCE

Eat in ironed underpants, peel peaches for ladies, and it's 'loo', never 'toilet': Prince Charles's ex-butler on how to dine like a future King

There is a LOL bit towards the end of this article

With his double-breasted tuxedo and Royal tics – nervously fingering his signet ring and toying with his cuffs – Grant Harrold resembles our future King as closely as any 34-year-old Scotsman in copper bangles can.

And as Prince Charles’s former under butler patiently guides me to my butter knife, this is as close as I will ever get to hosting a Highgrove dinner party.

Grant is now a Jeeves for hire. Last week, he agreed a secret out-of-court settlement with the Prince.  He was sacked last year after refusing to move from Gloucestershire to Clarence House, Charles and Camilla’s London residence.

The one-time Royal servant – who earned just £24,000 a year – claimed he was intimidated, threatened and treated as a ‘pariah’ by senior colleagues after refusing to move, despite his ‘exemplary’ seven-year record.

He was then diagnosed with phobic anxiety depersonalisation syndrome, a condition that caused him to suffer panic attacks when he was in a city for any length of time.

This led one unidentified member of the Royal Household to describe Grant as being ‘too dangerous’ to work with the Prince and to ban him from direct contact with the Royals.

Staff are even said to have likened him to Raoul Moat, the killer who also blinded policeman David Rathband.

But self-trained Grant is no Raoul Moat. Since settling his case with Clarence House, he has set up his own company, Nicholas Veitch, passing on Royal etiquette tips for £80 an hour.

And having worked for Prince Charles since 2003, he is a champion of palatial manners, a walking, talking Debrett’s. He insists on ironing underpants, he knows how to eat asparagus, he pales at the mere mention of the word ‘lavatory’.

It means that Grant is the perfect man to lead me through an impromptu dinner party thrown at a country hotel in the shadow of Highgrove.

Hovering at my shoulder at the Hare and Hounds hotel in Tetbury, he starts by helping me redo my bungled  attempt at a bow-tie.  ‘Think of it as a shoelace,’ he says, somewhat unfairly as he himself is wearing a clip-on tie.

Then, as I tackle my salmon caviar, he gently prises the fork from my right hand, puts it in my left and exhorts me to pick up my knife.

‘That won’t do at all. You won’t be getting an invitation to Clarence House any day soon if you eat in that American style,’ says Grant with barely disguised disdain.

He adds: ‘You must always use a knife and fork unless you’re eating asparagus. And you must never hold your knife like a pen.’

If Royal etiquette is a foreign country, dinner parties are a minefield.

My grandfather once told me that a gentleman should – after pudding – peel the peach of the lady seated to his right. I had always hoped this was a euphemism. But no. According to Grant, peach-peeling is de rigueur in Royal circles.

‘It would be utterly proper,’ he says. ‘At dinner, a gentleman must cater to a lady’s whim. If she wants her peach peeled during the fruit course, he should, of course, peel it.’

If Grant, who grew up on a council estate in Airdrie, Lanarkshire,  harbours any resentment towards his former employer, he masks it expertly. He is at pains to point out he retains the highest regard for both Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall. After all, he still lives in a cottage on the Royal estate in Gloucestershire and his partner works for the Prince.

Grant had dreamed of going into service ever since watching the  1993 film The Remains Of The Day when he was aged just 15. ‘I adored that movie,’ he says. ‘I wanted to be Anthony Hopkins’ character.’

Really? A tortured butler who works for a Nazi sympathiser before masquerading as an aristocrat?  Grant spins his signet ring furiously. ‘Well, not that bit, no. I just loved  his outfit.’

When Grant’s mother started working as a housekeeper at a country house in Scotland, she secured her then 18-year-old son work alongside her as a butler.

Grant went on to work for the Duke of Bedford, appearing in Country House, the BBC series filmed there, before moving to Highgrove nine years ago. His brother, a footman for the Queen, recommended him for the position.

Charles interviewed him personally and Grant was so well-liked that it was even suggested he was being groomed to become Prince William’s valet. And yes, you do pronounce the ‘t’.

‘When you are a butler you are working with your employer in a very intimate capacity,’ he says.  ‘They have to be able to trust you. Loyalty, discretion and trust are your watchwords. But working for the Royals was the best job anyone could have had.’

Grant is admirably (and sensibly, having now signed two confidentiality agreements) tight-lipped about his time at Clarence House. He won’t even tell me whether the Prince likes to wear his napkin on his lap or tucked into his collar.

But over dinner, he can’t help but let slip the odd, fascinating vignette. What, for instance, is the etiquette if, as a butler, you accidentally see your employer naked?

‘Oh, I’ve lost count of the times that’s happened,’ he says nonchalantly. ‘The trick is to maintain  eye contact and pretend that it  never happened.’

For the record, he has never put toothpaste on anyone’s toothbrush, let alone one used by Charles. And he won’t be drawn on the claim – recently denied by Clarence House – that the Prince demands seven boiled eggs for breakfast so he can choose one that’s perfectly cooked.

Seven eggs or not, Charles apparently always comes down for breakfast, while Camilla prefers hers served on a tray in bed.

Disappointingly, Grant has never ironed a newspaper, but he has run the occasional bath and, of course, ironed the nation’s poshest underpants. ‘I iron everything except socks,’ he says. ‘Doesn’t everyone?’

I am beginning to feel horribly inadequate. I have only just exorcised the humiliation I felt when interviewing Downton Abbey writer Julian Fellowes. In passing, I mentioned Julian’s fine mantelpiece. ‘Mantelpiece?’ snorts Grant. ‘Do you mean mantelshelf?’

But Grant is a kind instructor. He shows me how to pour the wine, making sure to let the label show. ‘You must always let your guests see the label,’ he says. ‘Unless you’re serving Blue Nun.’

I am almost sure he is joking but it’s devilishly hard to tell beneath his mask of professionalism.  There is, it seems, a right and a wrong way to do everything. ‘The bread must be broken, not cut. And never buttered on both sides like a malt loaf.’

And one must never go to the loo until after the main course.  ‘You should have gone before the meal,’ says Grant, strictly. ‘It is very bad form to leave the table during the starter. And it’s loo. Not lavatory and certainly not toilet.’ Jackets must, alas, stay on at all times – even in the centrally heated fug of the charming Hare and Hounds hotel. ‘It is preferable to sweat than to expose your braces,’ explains Grant.

But surely, Royal types just do and take what they want, when they want, don’t they? Be it another bread roll or another man’s wife. Isn’t etiquette merely a middle-class obsession? Working-class people  are far too sensible to worry about which knife to use, and the aristocracy don’t care a fig for what anyone else thinks.

Grant looks pained.  ‘All sorts need help with etiquette. Lottery winners. Women marrying into grand families. It’s nothing to do with class.

‘I grew up in a council house and my dad worked in a British Gas storeroom, but we always did things properly – a tablecloth and three knives each. Always.’

It’s still traditional for the women to retire to another room while the men enjoy a glass of port and a cigar

Attempting to write shorthand notes and tackle my brill fillet was never going to be a happy marriage and, sure enough, disaster strikes as I upend my glass of red wine over the lady seated to my right.

Berith Sandgrens-Clerk jumps back and just about saves her frock. Instinctively, I try to help salvage the mess with my napkin.

Grant is at my side in a trice bearing salt and cautionary words. ‘You must never, ever dab a lady,’ he  says firmly. ‘Oh, how true,’ agrees Charlotte Janisch, the lady to my left and evidently a past victim of dabbing herself. ‘There is nothing worse than being dabbed by a strange man. Yuk.’

From a discreet distance, Grant sprinkles some salt and, as if by magic, the stain vanishes.

I’m learning fast here – and not just about dabbing.  From the correct way to place your glasses – red wine to the left, water to the right, white in front – to how to leave your cutlery, there is much to absorb.

‘When you’ve finished eating, your knife and fork must be put together at exactly six o’clock on the plate, with the blade of the knife pointing inward,’ I am told.

The ladies leave us after pudding: Charlotte to reclaim her children, Berith no doubt to check her dress.

‘It’s still traditional for the women to retire to another room while the men enjoy a glass of port and a cigar,’ says Grant.

‘Occasionally, a lady has asked for a port, too, but very rarely.’ He looks almost wounded by the memory.

So what do the men talk about in camera?  ‘My gentlemen never talked about money, religion or politics.’

Sex and travel then?

‘I couldn’t possibly comment,’ says Grant, finally allowing himself a  little smile.

And the women?

‘I couldn’t possibly comment on that either,’ repeats Grant, neatly confirming the obvious: that Camilla’s cronies are even bawdier than Charles and his crowd. But we are happily spared such ribaldry. ‘Drive safely,’ says Grant, politely steering me towards the door.

SOURCE

Red Ed’s One Nation hero was a vacuous, egotistical hypocrite who sent British soldiers to die needlessly in foreign wars. (Remind you of anyone?)

By Dominic Sandbrook

There were two big winners from this week’s Labour Party conference. One was Ed Miliband, whose set-piece speech, delivered fluently and without notes, passed off better than even his admirers could have imagined.

The other was a man who has been dead for more than a century, but still casts a shadow over British politics.

By any standards, Benjamin Disraeli, whose spirit the Labour leader invoked with such fervour, was an extraordinary figure.

He was Britain’s only Jewish Prime Minister and one of the founders of the modern Conservative Party. In his two spells in office in the 1860s and 1870s, he invaded Afghanistan and made Queen Victoria Empress of India.

He was a brilliant speaker, an accomplished novelist and a flamboyant showman. But not even someone with Disraeli’s gargantuan self-regard could have expected that one day he would dominate a socialist party conference.

According to his cheerleaders in the press, Mr Miliband’s resuscitation of Disraeli was a political masterstroke. Presenting himself as the heir to Disraeli’s One Nation Conservatism — by one count, he used the words ‘One Nation’ no fewer than 46 times — the Labour leader temporarily banished talk of Red Ed, the union barons’ friend.

All his talk of One Nation made him sound reasonable, moderate, even sensible. On the surface, he seemed to be claiming the middle ground for Labour, as Tony Blair famously did in the Nineties.

What really appealed to Mr Miliband about the One Nation slogan, though, is that it invites an implicit comparison with David Cameron’s Tories.

Disraeli’s vision, Mr Miliband told his supporters, was ‘a vision of a Britain where patriotism, loyalty, dedication to the common cause courses through the veins of all and nobody feels left out’. But modern Tories, he said, had a very different mantra: ‘One rule for those at the top, another rule for everybody else. Two nations, not one.’

Of course, that is precisely the kind of thing that Labour leaders always say. But Mr Miliband’s words should have set alarm bells ringing in No  10.

To many hard-working people, struggling through a second recession in just four years, the Coalition appears desperately out of touch. Many ordinary people bitterly remember George Osborne taxing their pasties and Andrew Mitchell calling police officers ‘plebs’.

When David Cameron takes to the stage in Birmingham next week, therefore, he has work to do. At the very least his supporters will expect him to reclaim Benjamin Disraeli’s legacy for the Tory Party.

Yet the great irony is that Disraeli makes a pretty dreadful model for a modern prime minister. And when Ed Miliband’s admirers at the Guardian have finished whipping themselves into a lather of hysterical admiration for the Victorian leader, they might care to remind themselves what Disraeli actually did.

In Mr Miliband’s vision, Disraeli was a dedicated servant of the national interest, devoted only to the well-being of the poor. But to anyone who knows anything about Victorian politics, the image of a frock-coated Mother Teresa is a laughable caricature.

At bottom, Benjamin Disraeli was interested only in Benjamin Disraeli. His entire political career was devoted to his own advancement; it is not for nothing that he famously boasted of having climbed ‘to the top of the greasy pole’.

As a young man in the 1830s, he tried to make his name as a novelist. But when money and fame were slow to materialise, he decided on politics instead.

Like so many of today’s professional politicians, Disraeli had distinctly mercenary motives. Although his father was a rich literary critic, young Benjamin had run up large debts because of his inordinate fondness for the high life. As an MP, however, the law would protect him from imprisonment for debt.

His principles, meanwhile, were as changeable as the winds.

Having initially pretended to be a radical, he then flirted with ultra-reactionary Toryism, opposing efforts to improve the lot of the downtrodden working classes and scorning attempts to reform the corrupt political system.

Indeed, it spoke volumes about Disraeli’s essentially destructive style that he made his name with a devastating attack on his own party leader, the dogged and serious Sir Robert Peel, who wanted to scrap the archaic Corn Laws which protected British farmers against foreign competition.

Peel and his fellow reformers believed that free trade would benefit ordinary British families, who were naturally delighted at the prospect of cheaper food. But in this crucial test of principle, Disraeli preferred to back the wealthy vested interests of the day.

It was entirely typical of his cynical style, though, that once the Corn Laws had bitten the dust, he made no effort to restore them. Throughout his career, he saw principle as subordinate to tactical self-interest.

Most infamously, he bitterly opposed the Liberals’ attempt to bring in parliamentary reform in 1866. At the time, most people were denied a political voice: the Liberals, however, wanted to extend the franchise to a further 200,000 middle-class voters. That was too much for Disraeli, whose contempt for the common man poured forth in a torrent of bile.

Such a Bill, he said fiercely, would open the polling booths to ‘a horde of selfish and obscure mediocrities, incapable of anything but mischief’.

The Bill failed, the Liberals fell from power and Disraeli became prime minister for the first time. So what did he do? He introduced a very similar measure himself, stealing the Liberals’ clothes and carrying off the credit for reform.

Not surprisingly, Disraeli’s flagrant hypocrisy outraged many of his own supporters. Even Nick Clegg’s broken tuition-fee pledge looks trifling by comparison.

It was, said the Tory grandee Lord Cranborne, a political betrayal with ‘no parallel in our parliamentary annals’. The government, he warned, was now ‘borrowing their ethics from the political adventurer’. Cranborne was not alone in his belief that, in essence, his leader was nothing more than a brilliantly opportunistic con artist.

Today, Disraeli’s admirers like to pretend that he had the interest of the common man at heart all along. But this is nonsense, for as Disraeli’s most recent biographer, the eminent Cambridge historian Jon Parry, shrewdly remarks, his image as a social reformer was invented only after he had died.

Indeed, it is telling that like those other shameless mountebanks David Lloyd George and Tony Blair, Disraeli loved the glamour and intrigue of military adventures abroad.

During his longest spell in office in the late 1870s, British soldiers were plunged into battle against a bizarre variety of foes, from the Afghans to the Zulus.

As so often happens, the common soldiers paid a bloody price for the prime minister’s vanity. In Afghanistan, almost 10,000 young British men lost their lives merely to force the Afghans into accepting London’s control of their foreign affairs.

And in South Africa British troops went down to one of the most humiliating defeats in our history, with the Zulu warriors slaughtering more than a thousand of them in a devastating ambush at Isandlwana.

It was little wonder his critics thought Disraeli represented all that was worst about imperialism. But the truth was that, in the absence of any concrete policies or principles, he instinctively fell back on the basest jingoism.

In 1876, he even conferred on Queen Victoria the title of Empress of India, to the outrage of commentators who objected that such tawdry baubles were basically un-British.

It was pure Disraeli: eye-catching, vainglorious, utterly without shame and ultimately demeaning to all concerned. For Professor Parry, Disraeli’s fundamental quality was his ‘astonishing egotism’.

His letters were full of boasts that he was the man who had arranged affairs, that no one else was on hand to share the responsibility, or that no one else was competent.

Instead of surrounding himself with intellectual equals, like his great Liberal rival William Gladstone, he preferred to associate with ‘sympathetic women who could caress his ego’.

And his personal life, which was full of affairs, fell a long way short of Ed Miliband’s conspicuous uxoriousness. When Disraeli died in 1881, Gladstone nicely summed him up as ‘all show and no substance’. Even his novels, observed the great Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope, were basically fraudulent.

‘In whatever he has written,’ Trollope remarked, ‘he has affected something which has been intended to strike his readers as uncommon and therefore grand.’ In reality, however, ‘the glory has been the glory of pasteboard, and the wealth has been a wealth of tinsel. The wit has been the wit of hairdressers, and the enterprise has been the enterprise of mountebanks’.

Indeed, on closer inspection even Disraeli’s most celebrated legacy — the principle of One Nation Toryism — begins to evaporate. The phrase derives from his novel Sybil, published in 1845, in which a character warns that Britain is becoming ‘two nations . . . the rich and  the poor’.

Yet at the very moment the book was published, Disraeli was fighting against the abolition of the Corn Laws — the one measure most likely to benefit ordinary people.

As Gladstone wisely remarked, his rival’s ideology was nothing more than ‘some vast magnificent castle in an Italian romance’ — a misleading fiction, a brazen fantasy that could not endure the cold winds of reality.

None of that, though, has ever stopped modern politicians from laying claim to the One Nation inheritance. And it is easy to see why they like it.

Talk of One Nation sounds patriotic, inclusive and moderate. In particular, it allows politicians to pretend they are speaking for the entire country against their divisive, malignant opponents.

There is barely a single party leader in the past half-century who has not invoked it at some stage. Tony Blair, for example, once claimed that ‘it is New Labour that now wears the One Nation mantle’. And even Margaret Thatcher once told her party conference that, under her leadership, the Tories would always ‘fly the flag of One Nation’.

The truth is, though, that the One Nation mantra is not just meaningless but positively misleading. It drowns difficult challenges and hard decisions in a bucket of warm treacle. Patriotic treacle, perhaps, but treacle all the same.

It is a myth that political leadership always means bringing people together and obscuring differences. Leadership is often about making tough decisions between different groups — teachers and parents, say, or doctors and patients, or North and South.

What united the most effective prime ministers of recent times, Labour’s Clement Attlee and the Tories’ Mrs Thatcher, was that neither was prepared to sit meekly in the middle of the road. They were happy to take decisions that alienated people.

In both cases, self-styled One Nation Tories queued up to complain that the premiers had divided the nation. But too often the One Nation slogan is merely an excuse for woolly, weedy, do-nothing politics.

As the Labour firebrand Michael Foot once sagely remarked, if you sit in the middle of the road long enough, eventually you will be run over.

So if I were David Cameron next week, I would not bother trying to reclaim Disraeli. Instead, I would proclaim my attachment to a far greater Victorian politician: the Liberal statesman William Gladstone.

Given that he is already in bed with the Lib Dems, Mr Cameron might shudder at the thought of invoking a Liberal hero.

But he would be in good company: no less a figure than Mrs Thatcher, after all, once told her conference that ‘if Mr Gladstone were alive today he would apply to join the Conservative Party’.

Although Gladstone and Disraeli are forever associated in the public imagination, they could hardly have been more different. Disraeli was funnier, more flamboyant and more dashing.

But on almost every count that actually matters, Gladstone was far superior. He was a more convinced reformer, a more imaginative chancellor and a dedicated public servant who genuinely cared about the plight of the poor.

He upheld the principles of free trade, banished corruption from the civil service and introduced universal education for Britain’s children. And although he campaigned passionately for oppressed peoples abroad, he shrank from foreign adven- tures and despised Disraeli’s jingoistic excesses.

Above all, Gladstone was a man of impeccable moral seriousness, a hard-working, high-minded man with the courage to address the thorny issues of the day who left Britain a richer, fairer and more virtuous society than he found it.

How we could do with someone of his intellectual and political stature today. Is there a Gladstone in the House?

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The contents of two famous handbags

By PETRONELLA WYATT.

This is one of the most entertaining articles I have read  -- JR

For men, a handbag is a thing apart, for women  ’tis their whole existence, to misquote Byron and to echo the sentiments of Judge Zoe Smith, who told a handbag thief at Reading Crown Court last week that stealing a woman’s bag ‘is not just inconvenience, it causes fear as well.  Her phone is taken, her cards, her money to get a cab is taken, her keys to the door of her house. Then there is the fear of anyone coming to break into the house’.

Like most women, my handbag  is bursting like a glutton’s belly – but I did learn the art of carrying everything from the two greatest exponents of handbaggery: the Queen Mother and Margaret Thatcher, both friends of my father, the late Woodrow Wyatt. 

The Queen Mother dined and lunched with us four times a year. On each occasion her outfits varied mainly in colour. 

For dinner, she wore a long chiffon dress that might have been fashioned from icing and round her neck would be the contents of King Solomon’s mines. 

For lunch she wore dresses with pleated skirts, a matching hat and ropes of pearls. But it was her bespoke Launer handbags, dyed  to match her outfits, that were  destined to tantalise and instruct.

As she wafted through our front door, her handbag always preceded her. Even when accompanied by a lady-in-waiting, she carried it herself, on her right arm, which was crossed over her magnificent embonpoint. 

The handbag had its own chair, which my father placed beside her, in order to avoid the necessity of her bending the ramrod Royal back.

When we acquired a papillon pup called Mimi, the dog made a leap for the chair. My father did not distinguish himself with his chivalry: ‘It’s not my animal, Ma’am,’ he said, ‘it’s Petronella’s.’

But I have Mimi to thank for the historic moment when the secrets of the Royal handbag were revealed.

As Mimi tore at the primrose yellow silk clutch bag with its satin handle, the Queen Mother giggled. ‘Perhaps she’s sniffed out the chocolates,’ she said, smiling wickedly. ‘The corgis always sniff them out at Sandringham. At least one hopes it isn’t the gin.’

She dipped her beringed hand into her bag and drew out a linen handkerchief containing four Charbonnel et Walker rose-flavoured handmade chocolates.   ‘The blood sugar can get  a little low at my age’ – she was then 85 – ‘but chocolates always do the trick. I haven’t had a dizzy spell yet. Besides,’ she added mischievously, ‘it’s nice to have a treat after an indifferent meal.’

In winter, she continued, she often asked her equerry to pop in a tiny flask of gin.  ‘I don’t approve of heated cars. They are very bad for your health. Many elderly people have caught pneumonia getting out of a heated car on to a freezing street. If one is cold when travelling, a nip of gin is a much more sensible idea.’

Later she confessed: ‘I’m not as nice as you think I am. I am a very vain woman.’

Indeed, she carried a gold powder compact, set with an emerald, given to her by a maharajah. Her gold lipstick holder had been fashioned at Cartier to match. There was always a diamond brooch in a small box, ‘in case I feel like showing off a little’.

What astonished me most, however, was the Queen Mother’s revelation that she always carried a miniature first-aid kit. Might I see it? She obliged and showed me a simple thing you might buy in Boots. 

‘During the war, my late husband, the King, insisted I carry bandages and plasters in my bag and I never lost the habit.   As a matter of fact, I have used it more in the past few years, administering to my great-grandchildren when they get cuts and scrapes, than I did during the Blitz.’

Her handbag prompted the only personal remark I heard her make about her beloved grandson Prince Charles and came just before he announced his separation from Diana.  ‘Charles doesn’t quite understand about Diana and her handbags.  He thinks it is just what the newspapers call fashion, and like all men feels more than two is an extravagance.  'But a handbag is so much more to a woman, isn’t it? It’s an extension of herself. Perhaps that’s why it causes friction.’

I was a schoolgirl of 15 when  I was informed that Margaret Thatcher would be joining us for a family dinner. She wore a red silk blouse and matching skirt and her perfectly manicured fingers were clutching the largest handbag I had ever seen. 

Her black Salvatore Ferragamo handbag would fetch £83,110 at auction in 2000 and a black Asprey number £25,000 last year.Indeed, she and the bag seemed to have an almost symbiotic relationship. As the Iron Lady drank a Scotch before dinner, her free hand never ceased to hover above the handle.

When my mother called us into the dining room, Denis had the task of  carrying his wife’s bag and then placing it under her chair.  I noticed that she gripped it hard with her ankles and occasionally glanced down as if to assure herself that its physical presence was not an illusion.

Once my fear had receded, I asked how many handbags she possessed. ‘Thirty-five, dear.’

She required many handbags in a variety of colours, she told me, due to the frequency of her engagements. But why so large? ‘A woman’s handbag is her house,’ she replied.

Egged on by three glasses of the blissful Hippocrene, I asked her if she might, for posterity’s sake, divulge the secrets of what was then the world’s most famous handbag. 

To my astonishment out came what appeared to be her smalls. On closer inspection, they were two pairs of tights. ‘Moving about all the time, your tights can get laddered,’ she explained. ‘Always carry spares.’

She then extracted a bottle of clear nail varnish. ‘If you run through all three, the nail varnish prevents ladders from spreading.’

Next came a sewing kit. ‘I’m afraid I took that from a hotel,’ she said smiling. ‘But I can’t make speeches with the top button of my blouse missing.’ Had it been anyone else I would have said the look she gave was arch.

She then drew out a powder compact, a mascara and two lipsticks. ‘I use a paler shade during the day and a darker shade in the evening. Under dim lights, a light shade washes you out.’ 

There were cotton buds in case her mascara smudged, two canisters of Elnett hairspray (supreme hold) and a tub of Vaseline.

‘What do you do with the Vaseline?’  I asked nervously. ‘Apply it to my eyelids. It gives the impression that the eyes are larger and more wakeful and it’s a lot more economical than those expensive creams.’

I have never forgotten the lessons from these two legendary women, and as I write this, I have in my handbag one pair of tights (I have fewer engagements than a PM), one bottle of nail varnish, a can of hairspray, a needle and thread, a small bar of chocolate, two plasters and, like both the Queen Mother and Lady Thatcher, no cash or at least very little.

All these things have stood me in excellent stead – more so than some of the men who have complained that my handbags weigh in at 125lb.

I am waiting until I am 80, however, before I pop in the flask of gin.

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