Commentariat

Independent Columnists

Some years ago, Jane and I decided to get rid of a cellar-full of clutter by going to a car-boot sale. Among all our unwanted bric-a-brac was a velvet cushion in several startlingly bright colours. A few people admired it and asked how much we wanted for it. We said £1. They wandered off. Then a woman stopped in her tracks as if halted by armed soldiers.

It’s probably cheaper to own an aeroplane than a cow: especially at the moment. For the first time in ages I spoke to Dave Rowntree, Blur’s drummer, on Friday. We were supposed to be getting together for a bridge bender last week, a couple of days in a hotel, but I had to cancel. He told me he’d just sold the aeroplane we used to share. I thought he might be a bit down about it, but he was quite jubilant, quoted a well-known pilots’ adage: “The two best days of owning an aeroplane are the day you buy it and the day you sell it,” he said.

You know how it is, that first day in the new job? You’re groomed, shaved, combed, deodorised; your suit is creased, your stride confident, your handshake firm and your smile dazzling. You have checked to see that your zip is deployed, and that nothing untoward lurks around your nasal regions. You are out to impress. But somewhere in your innermost heart, there’s a nasty memory of your first day at school when you weren’t confident at all, the big boys called you an oik, and you couldn’t find your all-important peg.

Understandably the homepage of the On The Buses Official Fan Club was in a relatively sombre mood yesterday, noting the death of Reg Varney with the headline “Thanks for all the laughter, never to be forgotten here at the fan club”.

Matthew said, while slicing a lemon for his evening drink, that we must all learn from Barack Obama. “The man’s equanimity is almost supernatural.” he said, “and from this day forth I pledge to do all in my power to emulate him. Volatility is a thing of the past. Change is coming to my temperament and it is a change that we can all believe in.”

As England’s footballers prepare to take on Germany on Wednesday, thoughts inevitably turn to all the crunch matches between the two nations down the years, not the least momentous of which was the 1996 European Championship semi-final, when a limp Gareth Southgate penalty prolonged, in the words of the song, all those years of hurt. But speaking of hurt, here’s a funny thing. Of the 11 men who took the field for England at Wembley that day, only one is still playing league football. And it’s the one whose name became synonymous with injury, the one dogged for years by the nickname “Sicknote”. He will be 37 in March, yet Darren Anderton, captain of AFC Bournemouth, beaten 3-0 by Accrington Stanley on Saturday, is still going strong.

Celtic were fined £42,000 because a badly dressed supporter managed to run on to the pitch during their Champions League match against Manchester United. How things have changed – in the old days this was part of the fun of the game. If things weren’t going your way then you’d simply start ripping up the seats and hurling them at the players before all jumping over the barriers and rampaging around the pitch until the police cavalry were sent in. Nowadays, if you simply throw a well-aimed coin at a player in a sign of dissent, they turn around and throw it right back at you – a clear indication of just how overpaid they now are. Credit crunch? What credit crunch?

Up to London we go to see my dad march in the Remembrance Sunday parade. First we endure a stressful half an hour at home trying to persuade our kids to wear something vaguely smart. My son particularly resists this attempt to Little Lord Fauntleroy him. It takes me right back to being a kid myself – valiantly resisting efforts to make me wear a tie for the Easter church service. I’ve had a loathing of ties all my life and I’m pretty sure that this trait is genetic as my son is definitely heading that way.

The day had started, unusually for me, by David Tang telling me an unrepeatable story about Henry Kissinger; and after a bizarre sequence of events – involving Princess Michael of Kent, Burt Bacharach and a prospective meeting with the son of an oligarch – had ended with the graphic designer Alan Aldridge telling me how Lionel Blair had once put a smile on Eric Clapton’s face.

If Joe Calzaghe’s mouth were as unequivocal as his fists then we could believe what he says about retirement, but there is already a worrying amount of umming and erring coming out of the Calzaghe camp, with his father and coach, Enzo, now saying that “he doesn’t want to make a decision which may prove to have been premature”. But how can the decision to retire, aged 36 and unbeaten in 46 fights, with a vault full of money and respect, and an aquiline nose still intact, possibly turn out to be premature? There is only one decision Calzaghe can make with the potential to backfire horribly and that is the decision to fight on. And it should manifestly not be made on the basis of a victory, however convincing, over 39-year-old Roy Jones Jnr, who in Madison Square Garden last weekend could boast only a face and a name in common with the all-conquering fighter of the 1990s.

Put on the spot over the affair of Baby P, the head of children’s services at Haringey, Sharon Shoesmith, said her services had “worked effectively”. It reminded me of Commander Cressida Dick apropos the de Menezes shooting who said the other day that “we did nothing wrong”.

Journalists never fare very well with David Hare. The playwright once wrote that “The Independent is staffed by fools who know nothing about art”. That was this paper consigned to the cultural dustbin. And in his latest play, the profession as a whole gets short shrift. The token journalist is, as our critic put it, a “slimeball” who sleeps with the home secretary’s daughter, when she is only 16.

I went to the National Gallery the other day, to look at the Diana and Actaeon, by Titian, that might be saved for the nation, and suffered the aesthetic equivalent of a sexual fiasco. Before I went into the room I was, I think it’s fair to say, ready for congress – primed by various newspaper articles for an encounter with a great treasure of Western art whose departure from these shores would leave the national collection immeasurably damaged. In short, I was ready to be aroused and moved.

I was thinking about my dream that I had last week, about its intensity, how I had managed to conjure up such strong vivid images of my childhood haunts. Today I spent time thinking about the places that meant something to me as a child: secret, closed, open, wild, scary, wonderful, magical spaces. All the names, Trinity Square, Dane Park, The Lido, Walpole Bay, all these places immediately evoke strong, clear – I was going to say vivid – memories, but it isn’t vivid memories, it’s also feelings. I can see myself clearly at the age of 10, swimming in the early evening at Walpole Bay. Walpole Bay had a fantastic Victorian sundeck, the cast-iron pillars rising up above me, and as I lay on the sand I realised that they would go maybe 20 feet into the sand. There was something magical about the sundeck because of the shade and the darkness underneath and the vast amounts of lively activity on top. There was no comparison between what went on underneath and what went on above.

Here is a story about a rabbit, with walk-on parts for Abba and James Bond. It is a story that illustrates what an exasperating, if not plain barmy country this can sometimes be.

The wind blew force 11 on Saturday night, harder than it’s ever hammered before, thumping on windows, blowing clean through walls and slamming unseen doors upstairs. Claire was out and I sat content and alone, trying to concentrate on exactly what was going on in the verses of John Gardner’s rhapsody “Tomorrow shall be my Dancing Day”. I’m 40 next week and I suppose that is about my idea of a perfect Saturday night. Taking a song to pieces by the fire, anticipating my wife’s merry return. What a tune!

Joan Bakewell, the evergreen broadcaster and writer, has been appointed Voice of Older People by Harriet Harman. I suppose we must be thankful that Ms Bakewell’s title isn’t Wrinkly Tsar, to go with the Government’s Drugs Tsar and Youth Tsar, but her brief is radical: to make younger people aware of the everyday irritations that drive elderly people nuts. Things like the lack of lifts in stations, of lavatories in shopping centres, and of anyone to hoist your luggage into a locker on a plane (since the staff aren’t allowed to).

It was interesting that it should have been Lord Phillips of Worth Matravers who indulged in a bit of judicial muttering about the Government’s proposals to scrap the defence of provocation in murder cases – mutterings which lead Harriet Harman to accuse him of “defending a version of honour killings”.

His eyes open slowly. His hand reaches, as it has done every morning for the past 21 months, down to the side of the bed, the laptop is placed on his lap and his fingers race deftly and surprisingly nimbly over the keys. He is like a sloth who happens to be a concert pianist.

Bradley Wiggins was 10-years-old when he and some fellow rapscallions from the Carlton Vale estate in Kilburn cheekily rapped on Gary Lineker’s door in Abbey Gardens, St John’s Wood, only half a mile away but emphatically on the other side of the tracks. The last time they’d stalked Lineker, who then played for Tottenham Hotspur, he’d obligingly appeared, returning home from the shops with a couple of pints of milk. This time he wasn’t in. But his wife Michelle answered, and gave them one from a stack of signed photographs she kept by the door for such occasions. Wiggins and his friends went away happy.

Two gentlemen got on the train to London with me yesterday. There was nothing suspicious in their outward behaviour but my finely tuned “war on terror” antennae were bristling. Both men’s outfits didn’t really “fit” with the rest of the trainful of bored-looking commuters and gaggles of women off for a final Primark splurge before the credit crunch really bites.

Thank God bonfire night is over for another year. I know I sound like a bit of a party pooper, but I really do feel that, as a rule, once you’ve seen one fireworks display you’ve seen them all.

You can tell that something significant happened this week because The New
York Times used a 96pt type for its front page headline “OBAMA” on Wednesday
– for only the fifth time. Others reported the millennium, the moon
landings, 9/11 and “NIXON RESIGNS”.

Having seen the Beatles’ Love show in Vegas this summer – and it is unremittingly fabulous – the release of a DVD documentary about its creation was always going to find a permanent home in the Jones household. And, perhaps surprisingly, the DVD – Altogether Now – is as enjoyable and as uplifting as the show itself. There is also a 20-minute extra feature that charts the reworking and splicing together of songs for the tapestry-like soundtrack (on which Ringo for once actually sounds like he knows his way around a drum kit) that for some of us is tantamount to cutting up the Holy Grail and sticking it back together again.

My 6ft 6in colleague Angus Fraser and his 6ft 5in counterpart on The Daily Telegraph, Derek Pringle, dropped in – in more ways than one, since, to the wonderment of our children, they both had to duck to get into our kitchen – for an early supper on Thursday. They were on their way to the Rankin Club in the north Herefordshire town of Leominster, five miles from us, to do a turn as the “Grumpy Old Bowlers”, a troupe that sometimes also includes 6ft 4in short-arse Ashley Giles. It was an excellent evening, during which Fraser recalled that following the fifth Test between the West Indies and England in Antigua in 1994, Brian Lara was given a plot of land in his native Trinidad, in recognition of what was then the highest individual Test score of 375. Some years later, Lara invited Angus and a few others to the handsome home that he’d had built there. “This,” he said, giving them a guided tour, “is the Fraser suite, these are the Tufnell kitchens, that’s the Caddick lounge…”