DIARY
VICKI WOODS Athough Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber and I live in a village just south of Newbury, we can't vote at the upcoming by-election there. Our postal district is Newbury; both our marriages (as it happens) were regis- tered at Basingstoke; but electoral bound- aries being what they are, we cast our votes at Andover. Andover! What's Andover to me, or me to Andover? I've never even been there. (Celestria Noel, Harpers & Queen's new Jennifer, tells me that the Troggs — a Seventies rock band — come from Andover and made it famous. But not to me.) I'm crosser than usual about not being able to vote where I shop. Newbury will be a fiercely-fought marginal, and this year more than ever, I should think. It was Boom City, Newbury was. Thatcher's chil- dren built it: part of the silicon-chip com- puter corridor that flanked the M4 from Hammersmith to Bristol via Swindon. `Starter homes' popped up like button mushrooms all over town. Seventeenth- century quartiers with tile-hung artisans' cottages were zealously flattened to make space for them. Orange and silver ware- housing was erected on green-field sites to put computers in. (I was quite keen on this busy-busy boom-boom, though properly censorious about the rosy tile-hanging all smashed to bits.) Anyway, that was then. Newbury now is very different. We're Major's children now, kicking about on the high street with little to do. Pictures of us keep appearing in the national press. The captions beneath imply that this bit of my High Street is a paradigm of juvenile law- lessness, homelessness on a Bosnian scale, Hogarthian poverty and social meltdown. I began hunting my negative equity house for Christopher Logue's poem about voting Labour. I finally found it collected into Kenneth Baker's anthology of Poems and their Parodies, and read the last line with a surge of recognition:
I shall vote Labour because Deep in my heart I am a Conservative.
We are used, at Harpers & Queen, to receiving letters from 22 year olds looking for their first job, not counting 'work expe- rience'. The letters are more or less proper- ly written and most of the CVs sound ideal for a starter's job on a glossy magazine: three or four A-levels, firsts in Eng Lit at Oxford and Cambridge colleges, extraordi- nary additional accomplishments such as speaking Italian (so few schools teach Ital- ian that it's fair enough to call it extraordi- nary) or fluent Russian. I am haunted by these letters, especially since they now come from 24- and 25-year-olds who have never worked, only 'work experienced'. I hate the very idea of 'work experience'. What's the point of it? Young men and women arrive in my office suitably dressed, and they sit copy-typing for two weeks (Inputting' I should say) and fetch coffee, or (if they're really lucky) endlessly wrap expensive clothes in tissue paper for the fashion director. We don't pay the young people for this and their 'work experience' turns into real paid work only about once a year, since few jobs fall vacant at this lowly level. And when they do, there are plenty of seasoned people who are out of work, poised to nab them. After two weeks the poor little things go off to Vogue or Tatler for more 'experience', and I get them back again, a year on, with CVs filled with 'work experience' but no work, and praiseworthy To Whom It May Concerns, viz: 'Sophie is bright, alert, keen' etc. It's heartbreaking. At 22, I thought that a 'job' was just a drea- ry interval between putting make-up on in the mornings and going out to rock con- certs with boys in the evenings. It was no problem to find a job, leave one you were bored by or get another one a week later. Any tinpot job is now a sought-after luxury and the seeking becomes more and more desperate.
AFleet Street editor I know slightly wrote to me a fortnight ago, on Fleet Street crested paper: 'My daughter is very beauti- ful, talented, witty and intelligent and hard- working. She is writing to you herself, could you possibly arrange for her to be inter- viewed.' Hmmm. I wrote back, 'Dear X, Of course I'll see your daughter. We don't, as you might expect, have any jobs. But we do all have daughters.' Ispent much of Comic Reliefs Red Nose Day having lunch at Terence Conran's new Quaglino's. My assistant made the booking; it took a lot of effort and about a fortnight, she said. (But dear me, we must be fashion- able or die.) 'You need to be togged up,' said someone in the office, 'because there are stairs, and everyone looks up as you walk down.' I arrived — togged up — only just in time to beat my guest to the table and gave my name to the knot of young women greeters at the top of the stairs. `Just a second,' said one of them. I turned to a different one. 'Can you hang on a minute?' she said. I tried a third, but she turned her back on me and tripped off down the stairs, leading two men who had come in behind me. Greeters 1 and 2 then hissed at each other fiercely: 'I don't know!' `Well neither do I!"Some big boxing pro- moter apparently!' Still teetering on the top step, I watched the big boxing promoter Frank Warren — being led into the middle of the aircraft-hangar-sized restaurant and put at a conspicuous table. At another con- spicuous table was Joan Collins lunching with television personality Christopher Big- gins, whom I hope and trust Spectator read- ers won't have heard of. Nearby was John Mortimer, and further along was the Prince of Wales's perky PR Belinda Harley in the red jacket the paparazzi snapped her in later that day as she left the London Clinic with the Prince. Across the room was mad hatter David Shilling and over the other side was Long Life columnist Nigel Nicol- son, lunching with his daughter. Red Nose Day notwithstanding, everyone was eating and drinking with uninhibited pleasure and shouting at the tops of their voices. (The acoustics are not good.) It was like those puzzling marquees that one occasionally fetched up in during the Thatcher years, where elephant polo might be going on outside and magnums in great quantity popping inside and everyone saying, 'Who are all these people?'
But at least in a marquee you could find your place at a table without greeters bar- ring your way. At long last I was led down the steps and seated at the next table to Lindy Dufferin, who was wearing an RNLI badge. And in the distance, at the top of the stairs, I saw my guest arrive, too far away to wave to. I watched him getting crosser by the minute, repeating my name endlessly to the greeters; then I watched him attempt to follow one of them across the floor while others blocked his way. By the time he sat down, his teeth were bared, but not with hunger. We both picked at a bit of fish. 'It is not,' said the waiter, with political correctness, 'imported fish. It was caught off the coast of Dorset.'
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