My normally garrulous friend was usually quiet as he studied the menu. Eventually, he spoke. ‘It’s different from the one I saw on their website.’ I glanced at the menu and spotted ‘Sturgeon with Gin-infused Cornet Cherries, Cauliflower, Romanesco & Pericon’. Whether it was different or not, it looked pretty good to me.

‘It’s more expensive than I remember,’ my friend (let’s call him Andrew) added quietly. On the journey over to the restaurant, he had been telling us about his new system for managing their personal finances to help tighten their belts. He was recently retired and adjusting to life beyond a monthly pay cheque.

We were in Vienna for a short break with our wives. Andrew, an epicurean at heart, had researched and booked all the restaurants for our stay. The previous night, we had eaten in a traditional Austrian tavern. It was okay, but not great. Andrew had explained that this second restaurant would be better. He said it was Michelin-recommended. Not Michelin-starred, Michelin-recommended. In other words (in a language I can understand), not Premier League, but still pretty good.

On first impressions, it seemed he wasn’t wrong. Attentive service. One might say very attentive. Waiters, waitresses, and sommeliers were swarming around us unobtrusively. A man appeared with a trolley containing the widest array of different breads I have ever seen. It took him some time to talk us through each one of the twenty-eight options. I chose a speciality black pudding bread. My God, was it delicious. I had to have another piece. (My sourdough back home will, from now on, forever disappoint.)

We were in our own semi-private space, in what appeared to be an immaculately designed area where any noise from the other tables was deadened, and yet we could hear each other perfectly clearly. The building appeared to have been purpose-built for the restaurant.

Each item on the menu was creatively curated, with unusual combinations such as ‘Kid Goat Shoulder with wild Chervil, Rhubarb & Mustard’ or ‘Catfish with Sweetcorn, Gherkin, Elderflower & Marigold.’ Many would be at home in a Heston Blumenthal restaurant.

I chose ‘Char with Beeswax’ as a starter. Andrew chose the same. Two raw slices of char lying on an elegant wooden tray were brought to the table. The waitress then poured hot liquid beeswax over them, immersing the fish. The beeswax slowly solidified, retaining heat and gently poaching the fish. Ten minutes later, they were ready to eat.

We were each presented with a card, carefully displayed on a small stand in front of the dish, that described the course we were eating.

If this was only a Michelin-recommended (division two) rather than Michelin-starred (Premier League), we wondered how good must the top restaurants in Vienna be? Andrew remembered the time, a couple of years ago, when we had eaten in a Michelin three-star restaurant, London’s Core by Clare Smyth. We agreed it was, by some distance, the best meal we had ever had and laughed that we hadn’t realised until afterwards that it had three stars. As we were served various intriguing and delicious little tasters between courses, we commented on how this Austrian restaurant was beginning to run Core by Clare Smyth close in terms of gastronomic excellence.

As we left the restaurant that evening, having enjoyed an exceptional meal, undoubtedly one of the best ever, we spotted a plaque by the entrance - ‘The World’s Best 50 Restaurants’, it read. When we got back to our Airbnb (we should really have been in the Hotel Sacher after eating in a restaurant like that), we googled the restaurant. We discovered that not only did it have three Michelin stars (making it the second three-star restaurant I have ever eaten in, on both occasions unknowingly), one of only two in all of Austria, but it was also considered the thirty-third best restaurant in the world.

How did this happen? How did we unwittingly end up eating out in one of the world’s top restaurants without even realising it? Andrew remembered that he had had some difficulty booking a table online, so he called the restaurant to make a reservation. What he hadn’t realised was that there were three restaurants in the group, and he had inadvertently ended up reserving a table at the jewel in their crown rather than the more casual one he thought he was booking

As for Andrew’s financial belt-tightening, well, that will have to wait.

Duns Tew is a small quintessentially English village in the foothills of the Cotswolds. With a church that features in the Domesday Book, horses frequently trotting through the village, wholesome clubs like the Women’s Institute, and a tight-knit community of residents who have lived there for many decades, it feels safe as houses, tucked safely away from the mean streets of city life.

But things aren’t always what they seem. Duns Tew may look like a sleepy Cotswolds village, but it has a dark history of tragedy and infidelity.

My wife, a city girl who has read far too many crime novels, considers any quiet, remote place a murder scene waiting to happen. I tell her that statistics suggest I’m a far greater threat than stranger danger, but this falls on deaf ears. Morse somewhat undermines my claim that a quiet village in Oxfordshire is safer than London. Colin Dexter, his creator, is known to have frequented the White Horse in Duns Tew. As we all know, fiction is autobiographical, so the comings and goings in our village may be the inspiration for the multitude of crimes that confront Inspector Morse.

It is true, I have learned since moving here, that several residents have met untimely ends in tragic circumstances: a swimming accident in Mauritius, a fatal collision at one of the crossroads, a terrible farming accident, and a heart attack at a London bus stop, to name but a few: exactly the kind of cases that would end up on Inspector Morse’s desk.

More than suspicious deaths, it is perhaps the sexual shenanigans that reveal the underbelly of the otherwise apparently bucolic village. Take the example of the White Horse landlady who ran off with a farmer’s son from the neighbouring village, never to be seen again. But the epicentre of scandal, which makes Jilly Cooper’s tales look tame by comparison, was our very own home, Daisy Hall Farm. One might speculate whether the recent collapse of our dry stone wall was due to delayed shock at what happened behind it in the seventies. A story that was strangely omitted from the Estate Agent details on the property.

It’s a shame that I, as the current owner, don’t believe in ghosts. What tales they would have to tell. Such as the time when one of our predecessors was once woken by the police drugs squad battering down the door in the early hours of the morning. On that occasion, they had raided the wrong address. The drugs were in the neighbouring cottage.

But the main event occurred in the nineteen seventies and featured the man, Robin Moffatt, who was destined to become the last farmer of Daisy Hill. He went out with a bang, as they might say. Wanting to expand his dairy herd and beginning to experience some financial pressure, he joined forces with a wealthy landowner who worked in the City, was married to a daughter of a family banking dynasty and owned a nearby farm. As both farms had dairy herds, they combined their operations, and Robin Moffatt sold the land attached to Daisy Hill to his new business partner.

But then a stroke of bad luck, that could easily have been straight out of ‘Rivals’, befell the joint enterprise. Another couple moved into the area, and the wife took a fancy to Robin’s landowning farming partner. She soon became hell-bent on running off with him, and eventually that's what happened. It was a huge scandal; the adulterous couple disappeared, leaving two broken marriages in their wake and Robin without a farm. He lost all his land but retained the buildings, which he converted into holiday lets in an attempt to keep afloat.

Meanwhile, as it seems was the way in the Cotswolds (as Jilly Cooper would testify), Robin was also embroiled in an affair. Despite the unravelling of his business affairs, he was, as an upstanding member of the local community, on the district council. This brought him into contact with another district councillor called Stella. Pretty soon, it wasn’t just local council affairs they were managing. Not wanting to be left out, Robin’s wife, Pat, was having an affair. With the vicar.

Robin and Stella moved into one of his rental cottages (the converted farm buildings), a few yards away from his wife in Daisy Hill Farm. The White Horse was closed at the time as it was between landlords, depriving the village of a drinking establishment. Spotting an opportunity, Robin and Stella turned one of the other cottages into ‘Moff’s Bar’.

It’s a tale of the descent of a land-owning farmer to a barman. Robin, serving drinks in Moff’s Bar alongside his mistress, could look out the window and see his wife in his former home on the other side of the drive, no doubt sipping tea with the vicar.

Nowadays, Moffs Bar is long gone, and The White Horse is back on its feet, frequented by the odd modern-day travelling minstrel, such as Jack Savoretti.

It seems we have inadvertently ended up in a former den of iniquity (straight out of Rivals) in the heart of the Morseland crime zone.

Escape to the country, they say. And they might well add, for sex, drugs and a bit of rock and roll.

Like poor Joel in The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, my past is being airbrushed away.

My Alma Mater, Oxford Polytechnic, is gone. In its place, Oxford Brookes University. I used to be a “Poly Wally”, according to some of my, admittedly somewhat patronising, friends. Now what am I? A university graduate? Some might say that’s an upgrade, but what if I didn’t want to be upgraded? What if my identity was wrapped up in the more proletarian clothes of a polytechnic? A proud Polly Wally no more.

My public school boarding house (yes, I know, not especially working-class) no longer takes boys. It’s now exclusively for girls. That raises all kinds of questions. “What, you spent five years in a girls’ boarding house? Have you been gender reassigned?”

Only this week, I learned that my Prep School (you can understand why I so valued the ‘man-of-the-people’ credentials bestowed on me as a Polly Wally after an upbringing in private education) is following suit and losing its identity. St Faith’s Prep School is being absorbed into The Leys to become The Leys Lower School. I was an Old Fidelian. What am I now, an Old Leysian? It sounds a bit sleezy to me.

The company I co-founded in 2004 was The Client Relationship Consultancy. It did what it said on the tin. No more. Not long after I left the building, it became Verity RI.

So the re-imagined me is a university-educated, sleezy Old Leysian who spent five years in a girls’ boarding house before starting a company called Verity.

Is that really me?

I was reminded of another old friend this week. Almost forty years to the day, I said goodbye to my beloved Citroen DS21. It had seen me through my student days, when each service cost me a full term’s grant, and my first couple of years of employment. But the writing was on the wall once I was given my first company car, a zippy Ford Fiesta XR2. Not for the first time, a trusted old friend was jettisoned for a younger, racier model.

I handed over the keys in 1986 and had not been in a Citroen DS21 since. Not that is until this Thursday. A friend of mine from the tennis club is involved in a business that converts classic cars to electric power. He kindly organised for me to have a tour of their operation, and amongst a wonderful array of classic old cars they were working on - Aston Martins, Jensens, Minis, Jimmy Carr’s Rolls Royce, E-type Jaguars - was a Citroen DS21. By complete chance, they had selected the Citroen to take me out on a test drive. It brought it all back - the sofa seat, the hydraulic suspension, the rotating headlights, the smooth, elevated ride.

When she heard where I was going, my wife issued me with the strict instruction not to buy another car. ‘Of course not,’ I had replied. After the test drive, I found myself asking how much it would cost to get one. Maybe £20/30k to get a mint condition old Citroen and around £75k to convert, I was told. £100k or so in total to be reunited with an old friend. Now there’s a thought.

And my other friend? The one that has been by my side for fifty-two years? The one that’s leaving for good tomorrow.

Football Focus, I’ll miss you.

Sometimes my love of fish makes me question whether I’m really a cat. I’ve tried doing what a cat does, but so far have only managed to walk along a wall. I haven’t yet figured out how the cat in this house springs to the top of an 8-foot wall from a standing start. And whenever I try purring, it comes out as a growl.

He’s one cool customer, this cat. He just sits out of reach on the kitchen unit, tail slowly swaying from side to side, watching me as if I’m some sort of freak show.

To be honest, that’s not me. Life’s too exciting. I’m all dog, me. Albeit a dog with a love of mackerel.

On my ‘Why Wait’ Substack page, for example, that will probably entail advice and guidance towards helping people take the first step towards starting their own business. This advice will be separate from and additional to the case histories I currently post, which will remain free for everyone.

My approach on The Good Humorist has been to give paid subscribers full access to all my posts and limited access to free subscribers. The downside is that this reduces my audience and doesn’t necessarily deliver any specific value to paid subscribers. So I plan to open access to all my posts while developing something worth paying for from The Good Humorist. My intention here remains the same: To let the light in with humour in an increasingly dark world and to lift your spirits just a little bit by making you laugh or smile.

Life was simpler then, when we were young, so much younger than today.

Calculating my age was straightforward: Age = current year - birth year.

But now those days are gone, I’m not so self-assured.

They say you’re as old as you feel. Well, that’s not helpful. Sometimes I feel ninety-three (generally first thing in the morning, having gone a few rounds with my ten-week-old puppy), other times twenty-one. And, when I’ve been naughty, six. So how does that work? Do I average them out? That would make me forty. Sounds about right, that’s when life begins.

Spotify, in its Unwrapped summary of the year, told me my listening age in 2025 was seventy-five. It said my friend Mark, who likes to think of himself as a young man even though he’s chronologically older than me, was twenty-seven. Which makes me think he must have rigged it. Even worse, my wife’s listening age was eighteen. So Spotify thinks I’m a seventy-five-year-old man with an eighteen-year-old wife. Not good. What kind of man does Spotify think I am? I’ve spent most of this year listening to CMAT in a desperate attempt to lose a few decades. I’m accurately aware that an eighteen-year-old wife (apparently my wife) is either in it for the money (in which case I’m vulnerable to meeting a premature end in suspicious circumstances) or she’s not going to stick around for long. Ask Bill Wyman. Either way, I need to do something about my listening age.

My vascular age is a little more encouraging. Not much, but at least it doesn’t have me down as an old-age pensioner. What is vascular age, you might well ask? It’s something I get a read on every day, as my scales, which I bought to tell me my weight, have taken it upon themselves to branch out in a bewildering array of different metrics. I can tell you what I’m composed of (fat and muscle basically, and not much else), how my nerves are holding up (not good with Cambridge United’s push for promotion beginning to falter), the rhythm of my beating heart and my vascular age. All this data seems to be contained in the soles of my feet (how else could my scales know?). Eat your heart out, palm reader, you’re looking in the wrong place. Apparently, vascular age is the biological age of one’s arteries. Mine, apparently, is three years younger than my chronological age. I’m getting vascularly younger; maybe I should concentrate on this rather than my listening age. I could be a vascular teenager into seventies prog rock.

And then there are all the cultural ways of measuring your age: the East Asia Age Reckoner and the Hijri Calendar, which has me two years older than my Gregorian age. I must tell HMRC that I’ll soon qualify for my state pension based on my Hijri age. Being born in the year of the tiger, my Chinese age is close to my Hijri age.

I thought my dog age was four hundred and forty-five, but apparently not. I’m only just short of a hundred, according to the What’s My Dog Age Calculator. (I wonder if I’ll get a telegram from the King.) No longer is it as straightforward as one dog year equates to seven human years. Like everything else, it’s all got a whole lot more complicated.

Gender, for example. It used to be that my gender was determined by my anatomical appendage. But now it seems I can choose whether I’m a he or a she. Or both. Or neither. Maybe I get to choose my age, too. Given I’m now having to scroll further and further down the age categories, it would be much quicker if I selected one of the earlier options, say the eighteen to twenty-four category. That would feel better.

And then there’s appearance. I always used to look older than my age. When we started going out together, my wife, who’s an older woman, whatever Spotify might think. Just to digress for a minute, I never understand why men often gravitate towards women younger than themselves. Give me an older woman any day. Actually, that doesn’t sound quite right, but you know what I mean. I hope you do. When we first got together, my wife, then my fiancée, was often asked who that older man was whom she was with. Now I think my age is catching up, maybe even overtaking, my appearance. I’m the Benjamin Button of the Cotswolds.

A question on Bill Nighy’s Ill-Advised podcast caught my attention the other day. A twenty-something man asked whether it would be cool to start wearing a cravat. I immediately wondered why I, a Gravatt, had never worn a cravat. After all, I was once given the nickname ’Silky’. I liked it because it suited my silky smooth personality, but its origins were more about silk cravats, especially since at the time I had a penchant for silk ties. I pricked up my ears at the question and thought I should really have worn silk cravats when I had that nickname. I was interested to hear what Bill Nighy’s advice would be. This was his answer.

“You can’t wear a cravat, you’ll look like someone who’s sixty-three.”

That’s exactly how old I am (chronologically). The time is right. I should start wearing a cravat.

I could ask for one for my birthday, but that wouldn’t work because then I’ll be sixty-four.

When I’ll be older, losing my hair.

Not many years from now.

… When I’m sixty-four.

I’ve been asked to write a column. I’m a dog for Fido’s sake, not a f-ing columnist. Excuse my language. This is domestication gone mad. I’m bred to work, but they want me to do tricks like a performing seal. The humiliation. What would my ancestors have made of it? From king of the mountains to the life of a pampered pet in the Cotswolds. The descent of border collie, that’s what it is.

But, not one to shirk a challenge, I’ll do whatever I’m told to do. Fetch a ball, sit, don’t bark with my mouthful, jump through hoops, chew a bone rather than antique furniture, walk to heel, write a Substack post. If I’m honest, I’d prefer to herd sheep, but how hard can it be to string a few words together?

I should introduce myself. Woof. I’m Kelso. Born and bred in Princes Risborough. I know, what’s a northern breed like mine doing south of the Watford Gap? Think of my family as pioneers. To say we followed the sheep isn’t right, but they were there, and someone needed to watch the flock at night.

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They say that in your final moments, your life flashes in front of you. Quite how they know this, I have no idea, but that’s what they say. And who am I, a mere mortal, to question them?

What’s troubling me now is that recollections are popping up in my mind with increasing frequency. Not yet spooled together into a coherent narrative, they are nonetheless glimpses of my past. My life is flashing before me intermittently.

Moments such as when I beat a burning blackbird to death in the early hours of the morning before sitting my finals exam. Or when I queued overnight on King's Parade, Cambridge, in December for King’s Christmas Carol Service and promptly fell into a deep sleep the moment the service began. Or my games of football in my parents’ garden with the sister of the now-imprisoned ex-president of Pakistan, Imran Khan. Or seeing 10CC perform live in Oxford (scratch that, that wasn’t a distant memory, that happened a couple of weeks ago). Or when a piece I wrote for the college newsletter provoked a mass walkout by the cleaning staff.

What can this mean? Is the projectionist warming up? Is the pa-pa, pa-pa, pa-pahhhh ... pa! of Pearl and Dean about to strike up and the movie of my life spring into action? Is this a sign that the end, if not nigh, is getting close? Is the fat lady doing her vocal exercises in the dressing room?

Or is that I’m now at the point where there’s more behind me than ahead? Where the rear-view mirror is more interesting than whatever’s around the corner? This can’t be the case. Not with Cambridge United on the verge of promotion, the imminent arrival of Kelso, my Border Collie puppy, and tickets to see Australian Floyd again.

I think of myself as someone who lives in the future rather than the past. Could it be that I’m changing? Am I in the fast lane to that rocking chair in the corner, reminiscing about the good old days?

I’ve always maintained that we live for the memory. Maybe I should just sit back and enjoy the movie.

I celebrated my tenth birthday on the island of Elba. I was told I could have a dog for my birthday. Inspired by Shep on Blue Peter, I chose to have a border collie. I called her Elbie.

She was my best friend, sharing my passion for tennis and football. She was an enthusiastic ball girl, running back and forth along the court while tracking every ball. And she would retrieve any ball that was hit out of the court, even those that ended up in the neighbouring field. She found every single one and would bring it back to the edge of the court before returning to her energetic running duties.

But her real talent was as a centre forward. She knew where the goal was and where to position herself. Whenever I had a friend over, one of us would go in goal, and the other would take corners for Elbie to head into the goal. She scored more than she missed.

Fifty-three years later, I’m getting my second border collie. He checks in this Easter weekend.

His name is Kelso. And just as I got Elbie after returning from a family holiday in Elba, Kelso arrives not long after my brother and I went on a walking holiday in the Scottish borders, including through the beautiful town of Kelso. (Thankfully, I didn’t holiday in Skegness this year!)

I don’t yet know what his sporting talent is, but his breeder commented that he’s unusually chilled and calm. (This clinched our choice of puppy for my wife, who has some misgivings about her husband taking on a highly energetic breed of dog.)

But if he has half the sporting aptitude of his predecessor, we’re going to get on fine.

Here is the clock. The Trumptown clock. Telling the time, sensibly, steadily, never too quickly, never too slowly, telling the time for Trumptown. Tick, tock, tick tock, fighting to be heard over the sound of gunfire in the park.

Miss Lovelace screamed. Her three Pekingese, Mitzi, Daphne, and Lulu, went completely loopy.

The bodies of two slain innocents lay on the edge of the duck pond in Trumptown Park. Slaughtered in plain sight by the Mayor’s Blackshirts. One of the uniformed thugs could be heard to say, “Pretty good,” as he admired his gruesome handiwork.

The gathering storm had arrived with vengeance. Trumptown had been a peaceful community, so much so that it had inspired a children’s TV series in 1967, which appeared on the BBC’s Watch with Mother. But the new mayor had torn up the community’s code of behaviour and brought with him division, hatred and now violence to the quiet market town.

The Duck Pond Massacre would become a defining moment in the history of Trumptown. A fork in the road. Either it would presage a descent into the darkness, or the townfolk would rise up and overthrow the evil dictator. Even those who had been prepared to give the new mayor the benefit of the doubt, those who had been seduced by his promise of T.W.I.T. Totally Winningly in Trumptown, now saw he didn’t give a damn about them. He was Dick Dastardly, the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang child catcher and the Joker rolled into one.

He had said he could shoot someone in the town square and get away with it. No one believed he would actually do it. And yet now, although he hadn’t pulled the trigger himself, there was no doubt this was the work of the maniac that was now their mayor.

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I entered America with some trepidation. A friend asked whether we would turn our phones off before we arrived so the Immigration Officers wouldn’t be able to check them for emails from friends criticising the President. Really? In America, where free speech is a constitutional right? That’s the kind of thing that used to concern me when I visited the likes of Russia or China. But America? I’ve always had a soft spot for the States, but now it felt as if I was about to cross enemy lines. I decided to pause my Trumptown posts, much as I relished the challenge of convincing a humourless immigration official that my parody of the current US administration through a 60-year-old English children’s TV series was, in fact, despite all appearances to the contrary, a homage to the current administration.

Such has been the media coverage in recent weeks that I fully expected to land in a war zone, with armed I.C.E. warriors patrolling streets littered with dead innocent civilians.

But of course, it’s not like that. As the great man himself points out, the media is full of lies spewed out by woke liberal elites.

Admittedly, we were in California, not Trumpland, but even so, the America we found ourselves in was the one I knew and loved, rather than the one I had read about in the news.

In many ways, it’s a country like ours, only bigger and with a different accent. But it’s not quite the same. Here are some observations from an Englishman in California on those differences:

- While we Brits pride ourselves on our eccentricity, the Americans have their own brand of quirky, much of it evident along Santa Monica beach on a Sunday afternoon.

- Whereas rock music in the UK tends to be countercultural, it is American culture. The thing to do if you own a matte black, open-top 1967 Dodge Coronet in Santa Monica is to park it near the beach alongside all the other classic cars and play ‘Hotel California’ at full volume. “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”

- The Europeans made history; the Americans buy it. As John Paul Getty said of the replica Roman Villa he built at a cost of around $500m, “Go to Pompeii and Herculaneum and see Roman villas the way they are now… then go to Malibu and see the way they were in ancient times,” Just up the road, the stunning Getty Museum houses one of the world’s best collections of European masterpieces.

- Even when it gets its fourth lane, the M25 is like a small country road compared with a standard seven-lane American highway. Driving around Los Angeles, with cars overtaking on all sides and large trucks like the one in ‘Duel’ bearing down behind you, is not for the faint-hearted.

- No Englishman in their right mind would consider driving two and a half hours to meet some friends for dinner, as ours, Cynthia (someone I first met when I was a teenager, hitch-hiking down the Eastern US seaboard) and Paul, did from San Diego to see us in Palm Desert. Not only that, they also insisted on paying for dinner.

- Tennis in England is played in whites at tournaments where umpires say “quiet, please” and commercial branding is discreet. The name of the game in the States is razzmataz, with commercials on the big screen between games and live music in the eating area. Some might say it’s not cricket.

- As for social tennis, in England it’s a battle against the elements: sub-zero temperatures, wind, rain, and sometimes even snow. It’s not like that in California, where I played on a beautifully manicured grass court in the heat of the late afternoon sun. An old college colleague, whom I last saw forty-five years ago, responded to my Substack post the previous week. Knowing he lived in California, I replied, saying I was going to be in his neck of the woods. Not only was he at the Indian Wells tennis tournament on the same days as us, but he had a weekend house just ten minutes away from where we were staying. He kindly invited me to join a group of his friends for a few games of tennis. Another point of difference. Brits lose. Americans win.

- One self-proclaimed American winner is the President. I was about to suggest British leaders are different in that they are more humble and have more brain cells, but then I remembered Johnson and Truss. Unsurprisingly, given we were in California, no one we spoke to had a good word to say about the greatest, bigliest and best leader of the free world. One Uber driver told us that “Trump’s brain has two sides. On the left, nothing’s right. On the right, nothing’s left.”

One would never have known we were in a country at war. Back home, it’s so much closer and more consequential. I read about the protests outside the American embassy in London, whereas the only protest I saw in the States was my wife’s objection to her husband being a bad loser at cards. In a country where less than half the population have a passport, the rest of the world is another world far away, a world apart. It’s easy to see why they voted for a man who promised to make them great again and to stop picking fights in foreign lands. It’s just a shame they believed him.

Checked out – and left – California.

I’ve been mentoring a talented young actress. This may come as a surprise to some of you. What does he know about acting, you may well ask.

Well, there’s a reason I was called Gravolta at school. My peers clearly saw that I had the chops for a leading role in Saturday Night Fever or Grease. Why else would they have given me such a nickname? To think, I could have starred in Pulp Fiction.

My stage career peaked with my role as Archimedes in a school play. (A brave choice of my prep school to have a group of eight-year-olds dramatise an Ancient Greek mathematician developing his principle of buoyancy.) My audition involved miming peeling and eating a banana. Who would have thought Archimedes was into bananas?

You can now see why I was chosen to mentor an up-and-coming actress.

Good mentoring guidance is that a mentor should speak less than 30% of the time. So we’re a perfect pair: me, an introvert; she, an extrovert. I ask the occasional question. She talks. And then, between sessions, she has to do whatever she says she’s going to do. Me? I do nothing. It’s a perfect gig.

Meanwhile, I take all the credit for her achievements during our time working together. She’s just landed a significant part in a commercial for a large advertiser. I had nothing to do with it, but surely it can’t be a coincidence that she got this role while I’ve been mentoring her.

There can be no doubt that I played a part in getting a short film she wrote and directed to be shown tonight in Tate Britain’s ‘Girls in Film’ feature in the Lee Miller exhibition. I introduced her to someone who mentioned ‘Girls in Film’ in passing, which prompted my mentee to submit her work. It wouldn’t have happened without me.

Here’s a link to her 90-second film.

Izzy Burton. Watch that name. With a mentor like hers, she’s going to go far.

The young hostess in the mountain-top cabin looked perplexed. A group of four elderly Englishmen had arrived for the night. She was taking their dinner order, and one of them had said something strange to her. She wondered if she had misheard him. He said it was important. She seemed to be telling her that he was allergic to cock. Why was he telling her this? Could this be his way of asking for his own room, of letting her know that he couldn’t share the small room with his three male friends? She began to feel a little uneasy. He was insistent on making himself understood and pushed his phone towards her. It had a line typed out. Ah, that’s what he was trying to say. He was speaking to her in French. Or at least trying to. “Je suis très allergique aux noix / fruits à coque” “I’m very allergic to nuts/tree nuts”. Tree nuts? Does that mean he’s not allergic to peanuts? Not that we have any nuts up here. Not other than the four in front of me now.

It’s long been on my bucket list to spend a night in Cabane Mont Fort, a Swiss Alpine Club hut, situated at an elevation of 8,000 feet in the Swiss Alps, with panoramic views of the Mont Blanc massif and the Grand Combin. It’s been one of my favourite lunch destinations over the last thirty years, but only recently did I become aware that they also offered overnight stays.

Finally, I got to tick it off the list. Three of my friends (including one with a severe peanut allergy) and I enjoyed a memorable night and a few bottles of fine wine, far above the hustle and bustle of the Verbier nightlife.

Another group was staying that night. A Swiss woman who had an apartment nearby but lived with her second husband in his home country of Australia. Her son, from her first marriage to a Dutchman, was there with his Romanian girlfriend, who had been brought up in Spain. Her son lived in Cape Town while working for a company in London. By comparison, we were Little Englanders.

The next morning, a beautiful sunrise over the mountains, a good hearty breakfast and then first on the fresh slopes.

So, here’s a question:

Once you’ve ticked something off your bucket list, can you do it again?

Late afternoon. Arrive back in Cotswolds after exhausting week, dog-sitting son’s highly energetic, adolescent Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retriever. Looking forward to 24 hours’ rest (run ragged by Toller) before setting off for week’s skiing in Switzerland.

Tuesday, December 9

6:10 am. Feeding cat. Sound of thunder in the background.

6:10. Ask cat if he heard that. Cat only interested in breakfast.

6:30. Village WhatsApp - “Wall down outside Daisy Hill all across the road”.

6:31. Rush outside. Our beautiful Cotswold Wall in pieces. Formerly 25 metres long, 3 metres high. A lot of wall. A lot of pieces.

6:31. Neighbour already out there shovelling stones to clear a route for traffic.

6:31. First thought: ‘Oh my God’.

6:32. Call wife back in London. “Help. What do I do?”

6:33. Call police.

6:35. Second thought, while hanging on the telephone (like Blondie): “What about my skiing holiday?”

6:46. Join neighbour to help clear road.

6:53. Third thought, while shovelling stones (boulders more like): “Thank God, no crushed pedestrians.”

6:54. Fourth thought: remember structural engineer conclusion only two weeks previous - “no immediate risk of collapse.”

7:00. Call

contractor who drops everything.

7:05. Police arrive. And stand around looking official.

7:15. Traffic people arrive and put up signs and fences.

7:20: Contractor arrives, makes what’s left of the wall safe, and miraculously has it all cleared by 10:00.

Our first year in Duns Tew ends with me remembering The Style Council’s song, ‘Walls Come Tumbling Down’.

Postscript

Pre-December 8: Wall deemed secure by structural engineer. Night of December 8: Major weather event, classified as ‘Storm Bram’, with heavy winds and flood warnings. Wall falls down. Conclusion: A slam-dunk on our storm damage insurance policy. Wrong. Insurance company deny Storm Bram was a storm. Fake news, they say.

The next day

Start humming ‘Another Brick In The Wall’.

This man’s racket became his passport out of poverty.

Born in 1836 into a working-class family, he was employed at the University Arms Hotel in Cambridge at the age of 11. There he learnt to play rackets and, within a few years, became their professional coach.

In 1855, aged 19, he set up a racquets coaching and equipment business

Three years later, he was appointed ‘Court Keeper’ at St John’s College, a position he held for twenty-five years.

In 1863, he became World Rackets Champion, a title he held for 3 years (later held by two of his brothers, keeping it in the family for 25 years, other than a 2-year break).

Henry, known as ‘Harry’, John Gray (1836-1915) was my Great Great Grandfather. The sports firm he started 175 years ago is now run by five of my cousins, the fifth generation of family owners, diversifying from rackets into cricket (Gray-Nichols), rugby (Gilbert) and hockey.

I’d like to think I’ve inherited some of his sporting and entrepreneurial genes.

162 years after Harry Gray became world rackets champion, I stepped on the court for both the Deddington Tennis Club doubles and mixed doubles finals. Okay, I lost both and only made it to the finals thanks to byes in the semi-finals due to opponent injury, but nonetheless…

Would I have made it that far (the heady heights of a Deddington Tennis Club finalist) had I not been the Great Great Grandson of the Racket Man?

(And would I have started my own business, had it not been for my ancestor’s example?)

More recently, I’ve embraced a new type of racket by taking up padel. (Harry would probably turn in his grave to hear me call something without strings a racket.)

And, while walking the pedantry mile, is it a racquet or a racket? I’m a racquet man myself (the Scrabble Q, after all, is worth twice as much as the K), but the nod to Elton in the title of this post wouldn’t have worked quite as well.

And now, to expand my racket repertoire, I’m about to take up “the sport of the kings”: Real tennis. So called to differentiate it from its more recent upstart, lawn tennis (somewhat confusingly now played on a range of different surfaces, most of which are not lawns).

While on nomenclature, the word tennis apparently comes from the French word “tennez”, which means “take heed” – a warning from the server to the receiver. (This is particularly pertinent when facing the wild serves of my friend Andrew.)

I was given a real tennis racquet for Christmas and am now planning to join the Oxford University Tennis Club, which boasts the country's second-oldest court. (Note, they haven’t bothered with the “real”, presumably because to do so would mean acknowledging the existence of the upstart, their bastard child. They are the tennis club.)

Harry Gray’s firm manufactures real tennis rackets (one of the few companies in the world to do so) in the small Cambridgeshire village of Coton. The village where my mother was born.

It feels as if I was always destined to become a real racket man.

Or rather, a Real Racquet Man.

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‘Labour’ is defined as ‘difficult or arduous work or effort’. Would you choose such a word for a political party? No, I wouldn’t either. With a name like that, it’s hardly surprising that they’re making such hard work of things at the moment. It sounds exhausting. Wouldn’t life be so much easier for them if they were, say, called the Easy Party? Or the No Problem party.

‘Vote for us and enjoy an easy ride.’ Isn’t that a more compelling proposition than ‘Five years of graft and toil’? ‘Improved living standards? No problem. We’ll sort it.’ Take a leaf from the commercial world. You don’t want a sharp intake of breath from Amazon and a lengthy explanation of how difficult it will be for them to deliver that inflatable doll to you within 24 hours. You just want them to do it. ‘Inflatable doll tomorrow? No problem.’ (Preferably in a plain brown box.) ‘Reduce NHS waiting lists? No problem.’ ‘Get growth back into the economy? No problem.’ Don’t tell us how hard it is, just do it.

The Conservatives are just as bad. Their word means ‘disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change.’ You can’t take them seriously whenever they campaign on the promise of change. The party that stands for keeping things the way they are wants change? That’s an oxymoron if ever there was one.

The Liberals are a bit better. At least their name reflects their philosophy. But why add a superfluous word? Of course, they’re democrats. They’re hardly going to be the Liberal Totalitarians.

And whose idea was it to name a political party a colour? We’re not in bloody playschool.

Wouldn’t it be clearer if our political parties were named according to their fundamental beliefs or what they stand for?

The Socialists

The Traditionalists

The Environmentalists

The Liberals

The Nationalists

To avoid any risk of political bias creeping in, I asked Claude, my A.I. friend, what he thought. He proposed the following:

Labour: The Social-Democrats

Conservative: The Market-Oriented or Traditionalists

Liberal Democrats: The Centrists

Green: The Environmentalists

Reform: The Populists

There’s not much I like about Reform. Actually, scratch that, there’s nothing I like about Reform. I hate everything about Reform. But they do have a name with an idea behind it.

Why is it that the Far Right are better at branding and sloganeering?

And, incidentally, how come they’ve commandeered the description, ‘popular’? It used to be that popular meant ‘widely liked or appreciated.’ Nigel Farage? Really? Somehow, according to the author of Populism: A Very Short Introduction, populism has become the idea that society is separated into two groups at odds with one another - “the pure people” and “the corrupt elite”. What does that make me? (Actually, don’t answer that. I don’t want to know.)

The brilliant 1979 ‘Labour’s not working’ headline over a picture of a long queue outside an employment office after the Winter of Discontent has a lot to answer for. It was partly responsible for ushering in Thatcherism. And look where that got us.

Even worse, the brutally effective ‘Take Back Control’ that precipitated an act of national commercial suicide that would do the lemmings proud. (To be fair, lemmings need a PR agency as they are badly misrepresented by the myth that they throw themselves off cliffs. They don’t. That was fake news propagated by Disney in the 1950s. The odd lemming has drowned in the process of migration, but one could say the same of another species closer to home.)

‘Make America Great Again’ is a good line. I think Reform should adopt it, as they are doing with everything else from the Trump playbook. Make England Great Again. MEGA. It would be true because they don’t give a fuck about the other home nations. I would be interested to know who they deem to be pure English. No European blood, obviously, but how far do they go back? Is a bit of Viking a disqualification? How about an ancestor from Saxony fifteen hundred years ago? Does that make you mixed race? According to my DNA, I’m 85% Scottish, so I’m out.

I also have to confess to liking the first-ever US political ad on TV, even though it was for the right-wing Republican Party. ‘I like Ike’ featured a parade of cartoon characters marching to an infectious Irving Berlin jingle.

I might have liked Ike after that. He seemed like a nice chap. So much so that he won the election, and four years later, the campaign evolved to ‘I Still Like Ike.’ He won again.

The Democrats hit the jackpot in 2008 with ‘Yes, We Can.’ That was in the good old days before darkness descended upon us all. Re-reading Barack Obama’s victory speech after winning the South Caroline primary – ‘And where we are met with cynicism and doubt and fear, and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of the American people in three simple words: Yes. We. Can. ‘ – makes me nostalgic for a bygone age.

What we need, more than ever, is hope. Not hate.

My vote is for the No Problem party on a manifesto promise of ‘Yes, We Can’.

.

Here is the clock. The Trumptown clock. Telling the time, sensibly, steadily, never too quickly, never too slowly, telling the time for Trumptown. Tick, tock, tick tock, one old man nodded off to its steady, predictable rhythm.

‘He’s fallen asleep.’

‘No, son, he’s just thinking.’

‘Thinking!’ Nibs Minton spat the word out. ‘That man can’t think. Thinking needs brain cells.’

‘Quiet, son.’ Chippy Minton looked around nervously. There was an increasing groundswell of resistance against the Mayor, but this had been met with a disturbingly authoritarian reaction of violent deportations. Chippy and Mrs Minton had begun to talk about whether they should leave, but if they did, he would want to make the move rather than be evicted. Where would they go, though?

There were ugly rumours that the Trumptown Armed Forces had opened fire on the apple pickers of Camberwick Green. Their justification for affirmative action was that Trumptown was being flooded with Grade-A cider and they needed to kill it at source.

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Gone are the days when I drove home after consuming five pints of Abbott Ale. Gone, in fact, are the days when I could walk home after consuming much more than a single pint of Abbott.

Gone too is my ambition to exceed the speed limit by 30 mph. I did that once and landed up in court.

Apparently, J.P.s are advised to drive like a magistrate at all times. Although I’m nowhere near as responsible a citizen as a magistrate, I like the sentiment. It translates to ‘drive like an old man’, which is undeniably a better fit for me. It’s when it slips into ‘drive like a very old man’ that it becomes more problematic. It was a bit of a red flag when my father told us he couldn’t figure out why everyone started flashing and honking at him whenever he went out in his car.

I’m zealous about observing speed limits, not least because I drive a car that looks like it’s asking for a ticket.

I’m still sore about being invited to attend a speed awareness course after being ambushed by a camera in Woodstock, driving at 34 mph on a stretch that had just dropped from 50 mph to 30 mph. I was in a Mini, for fuck’s sake. Minis should be exempt on the grounds of cuteness.

I haven’t played Call of Duty, but I imagine it’s the prototype for the speed limit game the authorities have devised. The game is to catch the driver out by suddenly and frequently changing the speed limit. It works like this. You’re driving along a quiet road, observing the 50 mph limit, when all of a sudden it drops to 20 mph. Extra points if you spot the school and the speed camera. A hundred yards on, it jumps to 60 mph, where it remains for just long enough for you to accelerate up to the limit before you pass a 30 mph sign partially obscured by a bush.

There’s a Wizard of Oz character behind the scenes at the Department of Transport who’s having a whole lot of fun. Recently, he’s started playing on the M4, randomly introducing 50 mph limits and justifying them with an air-quality claim guaranteed to enrage petrolheads.

As much as I enjoyed the course (Seriously. I learnt at what speed you can pass a horse. 5 mph. Valuable information given I’m now a country lad), I’ve no desire to return to the naughty step. So I’ve programmed my car to keep me on the straight and narrow. It beeps every time I step out of line. There’s a narrow road near us with a humpback bridge over the River Cherwell, followed by a blind corner under a railway bridge. My car is generally pretty accurate on speed limits, but either it had a brain freeze or was hacked by the Wizard of Oz, since it told me the limit on that stretch of road was 180 mph. Had I crested that humpback bridge at that speed, another driver offender course would have been the least of my worries.

Driving like an old man, in other words, as a law-abiding citizen, around here inevitably means there’s always another car glued to my tail, impatient for the opportunity to pass. Nine times out of ten, the car behind will be the same marque, often black with tinted windows. Some say the letters branded on its bonnet stand for Big Money Wheels, but I now realise it means Blocking My Way. BMW drivers believe they own the road and are affronted by anything in front of them.

A more derogatory interpretation is “Bloody Monied Wankers”, but I don’t subscribe to this view. Some of my friends are BMW drivers, and they’re perfectly reasonable human beings. (Most of the time.) It’s just that something happens when they get behind the wheel. They become possessed.

The branding of my car, on the other hand, is much more discreet and tailored to the individual owner.

It’s understated, respectful (Mr) and personalised (Gravatt).

So this is what I don’t understand. How come I’m often the slowest on the road when I’m driving on the limit? If I’m going to obey the rules, then so should everyone else. I’m also a cyclist who stops at a red light. A dying breed. The other night, I nearly got taken out by a Lime bike that ignored a red light.

It’s the wild west out there (with all those BMWs and Lime bikes).

Perhaps I need to down five pints of Abbott, after all, before venturing out on our roads.

And then I can hit that humpback bridge at 180 mph.

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‘We’ve met before, haven’t we?’

This was a difficult question to answer. We had, but it was complicated. I didn’t know whether to deny it or confess that we had. Could I pass it off as a case of mistaken identity? I’d been warned he had a photographic memory, but I might be able to get away with it as I’ve got the kind of face that is often mistaken for someone else’s. Earlier this year, on the escalator before the immigration booth at Miami, I saw a man looking at me intently. I turned to my wife and said, ‘That man thinks he knows me.’ Sure enough, a few minutes later, he approached me and told me. ‘You’re Adrian Newey. ’

I shook my head, ‘I’m not.’

This threw him. ‘Are you sure?’

‘I am. I’m Simon.’ I could tell he didn’t believe me, so I added, ‘I’ve always been Simon.’

I could have gone on to say, ‘other than when I was Silky.’ I like to think the origins of this nickname lay in my silky, smooth style, rather than it being a play on the more prosaic ‘silk cravat’. I could also have told him that once upon a time, my wife used to affectionately call me Squib, but that was before she had been married to me for thirty-four years. She calls me something different nowadays.

Eventually, the man on the escalator accepted I wasn’t who he thought I was. ‘You don’t know who Adrian Newey is, do you?’ I didn’t, but upon learning about him subsequently, I could see why he confused me with him. Adrian Newey’s on a salary of £30m for a start. We must both have the swagger of a multi-millionaire.

It’s the nose. (Either that or the headphones.) It seems that I’m not the only one with the Gravatt nose. Unlike the hard-edged, angular Roman nose, the Gravatt nose is squidgy and bulbous. Adrian Newey has a Gravatt nose.

As does Malcolm McDowell. When I was hitchhiking around the States in 1981 with my friend Andrew, everyone kept saying how much I looked like McDowell in The Clockwork Orange. I can see why they confused me with him. We must both convey the same delinquent, ultra-violent menace.

A couple of years later, a friend of mine wrote a satirical character assassination of me in our university magazine. The subhead of the article, which warned fellow students against buying a secondhand bike from me, was ‘Mr Karloff bears a striking resemblance to Mr Gravatt’ and included this picture.

Back to the question, ‘We’ve met before, haven’t we?’

It presented me with a dilemma. Deny or confess to the man with a photographic memory who thought he knew me. A man who himself happens to have one of the most recognised faces in the world. For the man making me a cup of coffee in his kitchen in Rye was Sir Paul McCartney.

We had, in fact, met before. Fleetingly. A year prior, I had been speaking with his agent in Soho Square when a shortish man approached us. It was the briefest of encounters. Only after he left us and his agent said to me, ‘You know Paul, don’t you?’ did I realise who it was. I’m not good with faces. Surely, Paul McCartney couldn’t have remembered that moment a year later in his kitchen. But, there again, I’d been told he has a photographic memory. Maybe he did. So I said, ‘Well, yes, in fact we have met.’

He smiled and said, ‘It was in a restaurant in Soho, wasn’t it?’ Close, but not quite right. I did, though, agree that we had indeed met in a Soho restaurant. Even though we hadn’t. Who was I to contradict the man who wrote ‘Yesterday’? If one of the most famous men in the world thinks he knows me, does that make me famous? Is it like a game of tag, where I’m now ‘it’?

When it comes to faces, I suffer from a double whammy. Not only do I look like someone else, but I have a mild, sometimes major, form of prosopagnosia. Face blindness to you and me. Moving to the Cotswolds, I’ve met lots of new people over the past year. I keep introducing myself to people who tell me that we’ve already met before, often more than once.

I’m a member of nearby Soho Farmhouse, alternatively thought of as celebrity central, which tends to pass me by, as neither am I particularly interested in, nor capable of recognising a celebrity. I did, though, spot Jonathan Ross the other weekend, no doubt on a traitorous murder spree.

I can also identify a near neighbour of ours in London, Gordon Ramsey. I used to have a personal trainer who had a thing for him, and so I ended up doing my squats and burpees in the park outside his house on the off-chance we might see him. We did on a couple of occasions. The other time I saw him was, a little incongruously, in our local Pizza Express. The staff were terrified.

I have to ask. Why are many of my doppelgängers villains? The term originates from the German words for “double walker”, referring to a supernatural phenomenon, often considered a harbinger of bad luck or a ghost. I seem to have a lot of bad-luck ghosts. What should I make of that?

The one doppelgänger of mine that I’m happier with is hanging in the National Portrait Gallery. This is the kind of man with whom I like to be associated.

A complete stranger in a Kathmandu bar once greeted me as a long-lost friend.

I don’t know what he was smoking, but I think he thought I was Charles Darwin.

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