J ust back from a weekend in Venice, where I attended
the 51st Biennale, along with what seemed like tens of thousands of others. I arrived in the city tired and late at night, so it wasn’t until the following morning that I realised I had been sharing a room with a skeleton. Really. I had been billeted with an eccentric artist; the skeleton was purely for reference. At the Biennale two years ago it was so hot that people were fainting into the canals. This year the weather was perfect: bright blue skies with warm sun. In the Giardini I clambered over upside-down beer bottles in Belgium’s pavilion, kicked small silver balls around the floor (Czech and Slovak) and overcame a blast of freezing air (Russia) in the name of art. Huge fun. The last time I was in Venice I was with Bernard Levin. The weather was cold, grey and mysterious, and we stayed in the Danieli. Days were spent in the Accademia, looking at paintings by Carpaccio, Bellini and Mantegna. I wonder what Bernard would have made of the beer bottles.
Igo and visit Bernard’s grave most weekends. While I was deadheading the flowers, I started talking to a man doing the same thing two graves along. We discussed tombstones. At this cemetery, no one is allowed a standing stone: ‘The placement of a FLAT MEMORIAL STONE only, of a maximum size of 0.6 metres x 1.2 metres, is allowed. No raised item will be permitted to be placed on the grave.’ My new friend thought that it was something to do with health and safety — the cemetery didn’t want to be sued if a stone toppled over on to a visitor or vandal. I thought it was because it was considered easier to cut the grass round a flat stone (which it isn’t, apparently). He also told me that Richard Tauber (tenor, 1892–1948) was buried a few rows away and that there were always flowers on his grave. Bernard would have liked that. The simple wooden stick with a brass plaque marking Bernard’s grave until the flat stone can be put down has disappeared. Wrenched up and stolen, I believe. There is also a hole in the side of the mound of earth — but the cemetery manager assures me that it was probably made by a fox, not a latterday Burke or Hare.
Can you name one SI unit? I couldn’t until a few weeks ago. Nor could the television presenters pitted against the critics in a special edition of University Challenge. This came up in conversation on Andros, where I spent a week before going to Venice. One of my fellow guests, an engineer, was not altogether surprised that no one knew what SI stood for — it’s the standard international system of units (metres, kilograms, seconds, etc.) — but he was irritated by the reaction of the contestants when told what it was: instead of looking slightly shamefaced, they looked rather superior, as if knowing the answer to an engineering/technological sort of question was somehow beneath them. Forget Brunel, Thomas Crapper, George Stephenson, Thomas Telford, then. Intellectual snobbery, the engineer decided. I think he has a point.
While on holiday, I was introduced to the joys of the iPod. If my octogenarian host could work one, I was damned if it was going to defeat me. I went to the Apple store in Regent’s Street — a hangar of a place, with assistants, all dressed in black, using walkie-talkies and speaking a barely comprehensible language of gigabites, shuffles and so on. Back home, I logged on to my computer, transferred two CDs and plugged in my iPod (the instructions were surprisingly user-friendly). There was only one rather major problem when I began using the iPod: the allegro from Schubert’s String Quartet in A Minor was followed by Dido’s ‘White Flag’, then came the andante, more Dido ... I must borrow a child for a tutorial. Nearly 30 per cent of The Spectator’s editorial staff are moving house, including me. To the annoyance of those who aren’t, there’s much talk about estate agents, surveyors, solicitors, contracts and, most important, is the price right. There’s a wonderful website which has become our online Bible. Log on to it, type in a street name and up comes the price of any property sold there in the past five years. It’s also a sneaky way of finding out how much friends paid for their new house. So I shan’t give its name. Ha.
Ishall be sad to leave Marylebone, though. I came across an article BL had written about the High Street nearly 20 years ago. He was mourning the closure of the ‘best fruiterer and greengrocer in the borough’. We locals are now mourning the closure of Blagdens fishmongers (just off the High Street) several weeks ago. A notice in the window written by this thirdgeneration fishmonger explains that the introduction of the congestion charge caused a 20 per cent drop in business overnight, and overenthusiastic traffic wardens caused the street to become an ‘unpleasant and intimidating’ place to shop. ‘The insolence of office,’ he writes.
Iam a Su Doku addict. My latest fix is the Samurai Su Doku — a fiendish five-grid puzzle rather than the usual one-grid one. Rather worryingly, the Times suggests that it should be completed in 55 minutes. I spent from Saturday midnight to 2 a.m. and then another hour on Sunday morning. Friends of mine have abandoned crosswords for Su Doku. I have almost stopped sleeping and reading. I think I need help.
On Sunday I was leaving the block of flats where I live when I was accosted by a teenage boy and girl on the doorstep. The boy told me that he had been ringing the bell to my flat. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Because I want to borrow some butter,’ he replied politely. ‘Butter?’ I repeated. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘butter.’ ‘What on earth for?’ I asked. ‘Because I am baking a cake and I have run out.’ ‘Can’t you go and buy some?’ I asked. ‘I’m skint,’ he said, ‘but I live just across the road’ — and he pointed to the mews opposite. I handed over the money. I still can’t decide whether he was telling the truth.
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