I probably post too much about the activities of the birds in the garden but I watch them closely for hours and they never cease to fascinate. The feeders are especially busy at the moment, rarely fewer than a dozen birds on or near them, waiting their turn, at a time. Blue, Coal and Great Tits, Sparrows, Robins, Nuthatches and occasionally a Chaffinch. Dunnocks on the ground as usual and there are Blackbirds about but these seem very cautious and tend to hide in the bushes. Then there are the half dozen Jackdaws. Some don’t like them for hogging the feeders but I love them and the smaller birds just have to wait for a short while, and the same applies to the Squirrel. I often wonder what causes them to get spooked. There has been a Sparrowhawk recently and so perhaps any overhead shadow causes a panic flight and there are probably many false alarms, most likely from the Tits who are usually the first back on the scene within a minute.
Buckingham Palace
I’ve started watching the silly but fairly compelling season 2 of the spy thriller Black Doves, starring Keira Knightly (the first version of this post conflated her and Kristin Scott Thomas). Her character, the prime minister’s wife remarks that the décor at number 10 Downing Street is pretty chintzy but, she adds, “you should see Buckingham Palace”. I realised that I had never seen what Buck House looks like on the inside so I took a look online. It’s so ghastly it’s hilarious. Vulgar, trashy, gaudy, garish, overblown, an assault of deep red and gold on the senses. Just like the coronation trappings, it’s all surface, no subtlety, everything crowds out everything else, it’s relentless visual noise. No wonder the royals are all so dysfunctional. Primarily responsible were George IV and, surprisingly, John Nash. George IV spent vast sums of public money on it. It was supposed to be an awe-inspiring manifestation of the wealth and power of the British Empire. George’s younger brother William IV hated it and tried to give it away to Parliament. Queen Victoria didn’t like it either and neither did Elizabeth II who spent most of her time at Windsor, Balmoral or Sandringham instead.
It’s the same megalomanic interior design style we see from Donald Trump, Mohamed Al-Fayed, at Sadam Hussein’s palace and Robert Maxwell’s Headington Hall. I was sent to value the books at Headington Hall very soon after Maxwell’s death. There was nothing to value in terms of books, just multiple copies of Pergamon Press titles. I was given free rein and had to explore every room in the house. I entered one room only to realise that I was in the presence of Elizabeth Maxwell screaming down the phone at Paris Match, quite understandably, for publishing photos of her late husband’s body in the morgue. It was an awkward moment to say the least but she didn’t notice me and I left as quietly as I had entered.
It’s all tawdry ‘grandeur’ as an expression of power and intimidation. Maxwell installed a stained glass window of himself, portrayed as Samson pulling down the pillars of the temple. Performative wealth with no restraint. A form of bullying.
I don’t often let a chance go by to knock the royal family, but I do wonder about Harry and Meghan. Press hatred for them seems so unmitigated – Camilla Long’s seems nigh on pathological. Alongside Stephen Lawrences’s mother, Baroness Lawrence, Elizabeth Hurley, Elton John and Sadie Frost, Harry lost his case against Associated Newspapers Limited, publishers of the Mail and Mail on Sunday, having accused them of phone tapping, intercepting voice mails and obtaining information by deception. They have now appealed against the ruling. The verdict was reached on the basis of it all having happened too long ago and a lack of hard evidence. I wish them better luck second time around. They were not helped by the withdrawal of key witness Gavin Burrows who retracted a signed statement of confession and only agreed to give evidence from a secret overseas location.
By contrast, Steve Coogan, Sienna Miller, Elizabeth Hurley and Sadie Frost won their various cases against the Mirror Group and the publishers of the Sun and News of the World for unlawful information gathering techniques.
ANL robustly denied bribing police officers in the Stephen Lawrence case but it’s established fact that police corruption and intsitutional racism blighted the investigation into the murder.
And are the press not obliged only to publish when it is in the public interest? How does that apply to Sadie Frost’s personal and deeply private medical tragedy, an ectopic pregnancy?
John Lewis
Kristin Scott Thomas stars as the grandmother figure in this year’s John Lewis Christmas tv advert. I find it profoundly disgusting. Everyone involved, apart from the children, should be thoroughly ashamed, including the Rolling Stones who presumably gave permission for the use of ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’. The dissatisfied, greedy children are not happy with an old-fashioned toy and rush past their grandmother and sit around looking sulky. So the poor, flustered woman has to go out shopping again. To John Lewis of course. Oddly I watched it three times before I saw any mention of John Lewis except at the end, it’s almost subliminal. The little toy dog who goes with her asks, “Don’t you want them to like you?” She returns to her house and the children finally look happy and condescend to give her a hug. What message is being sent out here? That shiny consumerism trumps all, that love is for sale, that greed is good. What were they thinking?
Russell Brand
I very much hesitate to write about this man. I was once a fan of what was his anti-establishment stance (now he has ingratiated himself with and been welcomed and applauded by Maga and the far right, including especially Donald Trump Jr and Elon Musk). Self-confessed sex addict or not, anything he did which was non-consensual is of course to be deplored and condemned and he is rightly being punished for it. But I do wonder about an incident at a theatre in Yorkshire where a mother and her seventeen-year-old daughter went up to the stage after a performance, now reported in the media. Brand was chatting to everyone and when he saw the girl remarked, “Oh, you’re beautiful.” Inappropriate yes, but it surely is all about intent and context although age and power dynamics must be taken into account. He may have been licking his lips or worse at the time but from someone else in different circumstances it could have been taken as an objective compliment. The girl in question thought at the time that it was a lovely thing for him to have said. Compared with the behind the scenes crass behaviour of Greg Wallace on Masterchef, for example this doesn’t seem so very terrible.
At the risk of being cancelled for old-school male chauvinism, I will confess to a couple of remarks I have made or thought about making, although the fact that they were to women was not at all a driver. Respectfully and carefully and prefaced with “Please don’t take this the wrong way”, I once said to a woman working in a pub that she had the most beautiful smile I had ever seen, which she did. She really did light up the room with it. She was absolutely, genuinely delighted. Then at a hotel in Alderney there was a young woman who seemed to pretty much run the place and looked after us beautifully. I held back on that occasion, even though I was with two of my children and would have happily said it in front of them and even then not until we were about to leave. It was simply that she had the most beautiful eyes, eyes one could fall into. I didn’t say it, I respected boundaries, even though she had already thanked me for my courtesy and thoughtfulness when ordering food or asking for directions, and the last thing I would have wanted was to make her feel uncomfortable, but since I have rather wished I had.
In for a penny – I e-mailed a friend the other day who shares my love of the latest adaptation of All Creatures Great and Small. The last episode of the latest season included a masterpiece of acting from Samuel West as he realises, whilst walking a horse recovering from treatment around a field, that he is actually in love with the housekeeper Mrs Hall rather than the woman he is about to marry. There is also a bread shop protest scene, led by Mrs Hall, which is pure gold. I commented that even though Sam West and everyone else is so good in the programme, Anna Madeley, who plays Mrs Hall, is probably the best actor in it. One of those who convey so much with a slight turn of her head or a tiny facial movement. I carefully used the word ‘actor’ since ‘actress’ is no longer considered acceptable. I am not unsympathetic to that or the argument that it is belittling, but it does seem a shame that we are losing a rather lovely word.
The Guardian crossword
To finish on a lighter note, I do at least one of these every day, working back through time. This morning’s set by Matilda was a fairly tricky delight. I always enjoy the comments even when they are less than polite and I really loved this anecdote: “I must be getting too obsessed with crosswords… I’d just finished the cryptic and went to the computer to load the quiptic. Mrs J had left the browser open at the bottom of a page with the “Most Viewed In Lifestyle” links. The top one read “Lego piece falls out of New Zealand boy’s nose after being stuck for two years“. It was only after a couple of minutes wondering which was the definition that I realised that, no, there was no word count and it wasn’t a cryptic clue.”
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