Diary
Iwonder whether I am the only person not to regret the exodus abroad of the Chatsworth treasures. Several times last week I was asked to decry the loss of the Duke of Devonshire's Raphael and Rem- brandt drawings to the Getty Museum and other foreign art galleries. Frankly I can think of no better place for them than Malibu, California. There is a very good chance that I will see them there, which 1 would never have bothered to do in the drawings collection of the British Museum. There are more than enough 'British' works of art (assuming we call Raphael and Rem- brandt 'British') in Britain already. Even if a third of them were sold to the Getty Museum it would make a negligible impact on our national collections. On the other hand there is always something cheering about seeing good British paintings in foreign museums. While I will almost never spend an afternoon at the Tate, with all its attendant parking difficulties, I will happily pay hundreds of drachma or lire to see a Stubbs east of Milan, or the Gainsboroughs at the Huntington Library in Los Angeles The same principle is true of English newspapers and Penguin books. Every morning I walk to my newsagents and buy only two newspapers, the Times and the Daily Mail. In Athens or Paris, however, I will pay any amount of money for every available English paper, and read them with extraordinary attention. Paperback books that 1 could easily have bought for a couple of pounds in London seem essential pur- chases when marked up to 15,000 lire at the English bookshop in Siena. Clearly the only fair way to distribute the world's art treasures is for them all to be gathered into a central 'pound' and allocated, on a ratio system, to the different galleries. This would enable the British Museum to hang on to the Elgin Marbles with a clear con- science.
Last Saturday I attended a wedding at Beaulieu Abbey which recalled, so I am told, marriage ceremonies of the Sixties. The bridegroom, Nicholas Ashley, who is heir to the Laura Ashley fashion empire wore a rocker's drape coat and drainpipe trousers. At the time of his engagement to Arabella McNair-Wilson he declared that they wanted a 'groovy' wedding, so the pages, who were two and three years old, wore bootlace ties and had their hair slicked back with grease. Nor did the congregation ignore the mandate to be 'groovy'. The Spectator diarist and two other young fogeys were the only men wearing morning coats; the rest of the wedding guests turned UP in pyjamas, green top hats, gold waistcoats, open-toed sandals, shorts and Pink romper suits. More than half of them wore sunglasses throughout the service. I
do not know whether these 'shades' made it difficult for them to read their service sheets, or whether they had all been rusticated from their respective schools too early to grasp the hymn tunes, but the sing- ing was desultory. Several guests further aggravated the few older people present by lighting up cigarettes in the pews during the vows. With so many blasphemous inci- dents, you might expect this wedding to have been a depressing occasion. On the contrary, it was one of the jolliest weddings I have ever been to. For the first time I wondered whether my great contempt for the Sixties is really justified.
Four weeks ago Peregrine Worsthorne complained in this space about the deafening racket of his Fulham neighbours drilling, sawing and hammering on the sab- bath day. Twenty or so streets nearer Lon- don up the King's Road, the menace is not manual labour but faulty burglar alarms. At five minutes past eight on Sunday morn- ing a shrill ringing began from the house in Smith Terrace backing onto my flat. Naturally I expected the alarm to be answered with all possible speed by a posse of panda cars from the Metropolitan Police, eager to apprehend a potential housebreaker. By ten o'clock nobody had turned up, nor did the ringing show any sign of abating; if anything the clanging seemed to have become louder. Since Chelsea is a ghost-borough at weekends, with every living man, woman and dog vamoosed to the country, there was nobody to switch the device off. By lunchtime the ringing had become hypnotic. Sitting in the garden was out of the question. Even with the windows shut and curtains drawn dur- ing an 88°F heatwave, it was impossible to block out the noise. Eventually I was oblig- ed to shelter in the bathroom, where 1 devoted the early evening to a vitriolic letter of complaint. This I subsequently posted through the letter-box of the Smith Terrace house. I have no idea whether my neigh-
bours will be sufficiently polite to reply. At the time of leaving my flat this morning, the bell was clanging into its 25th hours.
An unusual amount of distress has been experienced by children sitting this summer's Common Entrance Examina- tions. For the first time in more than a decade, children who actually passed the exam, and had reserved spaces, have not been offered places by the school of their choice. This is because the usual last minute 'fallout', of people withdrawing their sons owing to cold feet about meeting the fees, has not taken place: every child entered for first division public schools went ahead and sat the papers, with the result that schools ended up with five per cent overbooking, and several children had to be 'bounced' by pushing up the pass mark. The Royal Enclosure at Ascot was full of aggrieved parents claiming that the Eton pass mark had been lifted from the usual 13 points to 17 points, and their sons had been squeezed out. Unlike airline overbooking, however, 'bounced' children have trouble getting seats with another school. No equivalent flight is coming along close behind, and even bucket-shop colleges are over- subscribed by July.
As one of the thousand or so people at last week's Anglo-American ball at the Royal Academy, which took place amidst the paintings of the Summer Exhibi- tion, I found that my party had been allocated a table in Gallery Five. As well as being a leading brand of greeting card, Gallery Five is regarded as the joke room of the Summer Exhibition, where the most borderline exhibits are hung. Normally, I suppose, people pass quickly through this room with a wry, slightly condescending smile. With a table in the gallery, however, our party was obliged to appraise the pic- tures for several hours on end, punctuated only by the odd exeat to the discotheque. As the ball progressed, the particular awfulness of the paintings became more and more oppressive. An oil of a drowning child being pecked by ducks was only out- done by a naked woman's backside framed by geraniums. At eye level, and only par- tially hidden by a Cona Coffee percolator, was a study of two skaters — presumably Torvill and Dean — which was one modern painting genuinely to merit the epithet 'a child of six could have done it'. All last week a topless art student (topless to draw attention to herself) was distributing leaflets outside the Academy complaining of the low standard of work. Most of the people queueing for admission dismissed her as a crank. Now I wish that I had joined her in her campaign, topless or otherwise. On Saturday I am going to Open Day at the girls' school St Michael's, Petworth. I will be very surprised if their art room isn't twice as distinguished as Gallery Five at the Royal Academy.
Nicholas Coleridge
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