DIARY
A.N. WILSON
My part of Camden Town has a number of Irish pubs where, often at quite unusual hours of day, you can find any number of Cardinal Tomas 0 Fiaich look- alikes propping up the bar and smiling into their whiskey. One such man bought me a drink only a month ago explaining that he was a builder who had told his unfortunate client, who had been waiting for weeks for a job to be completed, that he needed to spend the afternoon `collecting supplies'. The supplies went down very agreeably if water was added. I therefore almost felt I had lost a friend when I saw all the pictures of the real Tomas 0 Fiaich stretched out in his coffin and wearing his bishop's robes. He died in the most appropriate manner, while on pilgrimage to Lourdes, and one cannot doubt that he had fortified himself for the journey, both to Our Lady's shrine and to the Beyond, with a bellyful of the hard stuff. He was one of the most reassur- ing clergymen in the public eye because he was entirely without `side'. True, he made token condemnations of violence, but you always knew where his heart was, when he spoke lovingly of `the lads' or `the boys' doing their `dirty protests' in the 'H' Block or letting off the occasional explosive device. I remember the headmaster of a posh English Catholic school (a monk) telling me that, when he was a young man, all the Catholics he knew used to pray for the IRA, and he could not quite remember when (or why) they had stopped. No such falling-off occurred in the heart of `Father Tom', who was a merry Irish patriot, well-versed in Gaelic lore (hence the funny way he spelt his name) and a through-and- through believer in United Ireland. I liked the tortuous logic which led him to support a change in the Irish constitution, to allow divorce. Everyone knows that divorce is forbidden by the Gospels, and by the Catholic Church. But the first item on this former Maynooth professor's moral shop- Ping list was a United Ireland, and you could not have a state which included the Northern Protestants unless you allowed them to lead their filthy lives in the way they chose. It somehow reminded me of a headline in the Irish Times once quoted to me by Dick West — `Catholics and Protes- tants Unite to Fight Ecumenism'. I would drink to that, and to the good memory of dear old Father Tom — `Rome's mallet against the Protestant people of Ulster', as Ian Paisley, another hero of mine, de- scribed him.
The Queen's House in Greenwich, Henrietta Maria's magnificent house de- signed by Inigo Jones, has been recently refurbished with no expense spared, and I went down to look at it last Sunday. No guide-book is provided, but each visitor is given a grey plastic stick which, if held to the ear, emits a flood of information about the history of the house and the absurd rituals of the Stuart court. I could not guess how this device works. `You are now standing in the Queen's bedchamber,' said this voice in the ear, which sounded a bit like John Julius Norwich. If you walked against the flow and retraced your steps, the machine still knew where you were. The rooms are full of puzzled people, silently holding sticks to their ears and peering at the `repro' curtains, `repro' furniture, `repro' candlesticks. It is a mag- nificent house which has been wrecked by art historians, trying to restore it to the `authentic' condition of 1660. Therefore, instead of getting some good 17th-century furniture from the V & A which might not be exactly of the sort owned by the Royal Family, they have made their own. The effect is a sort of soulless academic Disney- land. When Henrietta Maria lived there after the Restoration, she was on constant public display and members of the public, like Pepys, could go down and watch her eating her meals with the sycophants and flunkeys who surrounded her. It would give the place more appeal if it could become the grace-and-favour residence of some superannuated statesman today. In- stead of taking children to feeding time at the Penguin Pool in Regent's Park, one could take a boat to Greenwich in order to see (who would be the best person?), let us say, Lord St John of Fawsley eating his alphabetti spaghetti on toast, surrounded by adoring acolytes.
`He wanted to spend more time with his fellow directors.' After cow madness, cat madness. One poor five-year-old Siamese has already gone down with it, and I suppose that, as with all these plagues, it is only a matter of time before it sweeps through the popula- tion at large. There will be scare stories about the incubation period, and one will be anxiously counting back to discover how many years or months it was since one last ate a plate of Whiskas or rubbed noses with a feline friend. I see every likelihood that it will spread to the human population. I have long feared that I had a touch of something like it myself. Sir Roy Strong, the famous aesthete, was talking to the newspapers last week about his cat, the Rev. Wenceslas Muff. He has commis- sioned a portrait of this animal by Martin Leman. `Muff is surrounded by little stars twinkling and has a little ball at his feet', remarks Sir Roy, making it sound as if something has gone wrong somewhere. In the brain of a five-year-old neutered Siamese in Bristol, sponge-like holes have been found. Goodness knows what would be revealed if Sir Roy had a routine brain-scan. I am only glad that neither he nor the Rev. Wenceslas Muff has chosen to reside in my rather roughneck district of London where cats are persecuted mer- cilessly. The favourite sport of the young teenage boys of the vicinity is to starve their mums' rottweilers for a day or so, and in the meantime amble round the district stuffing the likes of the Rev. Wenceslas Muff into sacks. Then, when the hounds are really ravenous, they introduce them to the cats. That's humans for you.
Or, as the Prince of Wales might remark, `It really is appalling.' I do not know his opinion of the enterprising Samantha Greaves, 19, of Lincoln, whose naked form has been appearing in news- papers like the Sun and the Star. She owes her success in part, no doubt, to her own personal talents and qualities, but also to a grant from the Prince's Youth Business Trust, who gave her £1,000 last October in order to build up a portfolio of photo- graphs to help her with her modelling work. Neither Buckingham Palace nor the Trust have been available for comment. This seems rather a pity. I should have enjoyed the Prince's comments enormous- ly. Samantha's mother, June Greaves, 54, has not been so reticent. `She's worried now', she told the Star, who have rather unkindly printed a picture of the naked Samantha alongside a fully-clothed picture of her patron, `about upsetting the Prince and not getting the rest of her money.' At least it shows that her heart is in the right place.
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