I have been 83 for three days and everything that ever
happened to me happened a long time ago. This struck me again as I mused on the
bravery of tiny Alice Arnold who returned litter which a driver had thrown from
his car window.
Many years
ago the delightful Anne, Duchess of Westminster, warned me of the dangers of
doing an Alice Arnold. She had been fishing in Sutherland and as she came off
the water she noticed a car parked in a lay-by. To her disgust the occupants
threw the detritus of their picnic into the grass verge.
As they drove off she retrieved it and ordered her gillie, "Follow
that car", which she said was very pleasing and fulfilled a lifetime's
ambition.
At length the offending car stopped. The Duchess, bearing the rubbish
before her, marched up to the picnickers and pushed it through the driver's
window.
"I believe this belongs to you," she said, at her most
imperious.
Whereupon the driver, a Glaswegian, handed it back. "It’s OK,
hen," he said, "we've finished wi' it," and drove off.
Anne, who owned Arkle, the wonder horse, was one of several widows of
Ben D’or, the fabulously wealthy Duke who carried a pocketful of jewellery in
case he met a woman who took his fancy.
Incensed at being stopped by a traffic policeman when being driven
through Chester to catch a train, he had a station built on the outskirts of
the city to ensure he would never be stopped again. Anne was one of several
wives. When someone asked his mistress Coco Chanel why she didn’t marry him,
she replied: ”Why should I? Everyone else does.”
At a Guildhall reception for the Davis Cup tennis team en route to
Sweden he asked them if he could help in any way. He was told they had nowhere
to train over there and they wondered if he knew anyone with a tennis court.
“Only the king,” he said. “Would he do?”
They said he would and His Grace offered to drop him a line.
On their return they met again at another reception.
“King any use?” he asked.
“Marvellous,” they told him. “He gave us the run of the Royal Courts and
a splendid banquet. But might we ask you a question? How do you drop a line to
a king?”
“Oh,” said the Duke, “nothing simpler. My chap just wrote on the
envelope: “The King, Copenhagen.”
“But, Your Grace, Copenhagen is in Denmark. We were in Sweden.”
“No problem,” beamed the Duke. “All these kings know each other.”
Continuing the relentless name dropping... At his 100th
birthday party I asked Lord Langford what it was like, hitting a century.
He said: “You should know. You are in the overnight declaration as
nearly my oldest friend. I expect you have found out that growing old is not
for cissies.”
That it ain’t. The worst thing is the way time suddenly speeds up. The
Spectator becomes a daily and it’s Christmas every other week. Or as
Christopher Fry memorably said: “You seem to have breakfast every half hour.”
FOR YOUR COMFORT
The Government is promoting a service to teach mothers how to love their
babies and establishing training courses for school children in handling
bereavement grief and standing on one leg.........
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What price talent? A dog gets
£500,000 and a cellist gets £2,000. What? Crazy? - Daily Mirror.
Ashleigh Butler was awarded
£500,000 on Britain's Got Talent for training her dog Pudsey to do a few
crowd-pleasing tricks. Meanwhile over on BBC2, 15-year-old Laura van der
Heijden, a teenage cellist prodigy, was awarded £2,000 after being named the
BBC's Young Musician for 2012.
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JACOB SPEAKS
'Taid, why do
you always save the hardest crossword clues
