DIARY SIMON HEFFER
Since readers of this diary expect glamour, let me begin with Miss Naomi Campbell, the celebrated supermodel. I was shooting on an estate last Saturday where the talk was of little else, for one of Miss Campbell's pals is scheduled to take on the wildlife there soon, and is bringing her with him. Although my host is a man flustered by no social situation, even he was rehearsing suitable conversational gambits for those longueurs between drives. Madonna, of course, has married a serious sportsman, and been photographed killing a few clays. Perhaps we shall soon see Miss Kylie Minogue — who, if the BBC had any sense, would have been an excellent summariser on Test Match Special during the recent Ashes tour — putting her first wounded partridge out of its misery. I read the other day that shooting is the new golf, which almost provoked me to give it up. I do. however, like the notion of a television programme entitled Pro-Celebrity Shooting, where a betweeded equivalent of Mr Jimmy Tarbuck engages in naff repartee with some posh totty as she tries to knock down a pheasant or two. We shooters pay our licence fees too, and it is high time our particular tastes were catered for.
It is at last safe for proper people to wear their poppies. I always understood one did not do this before I November, as to do otherwise seemed to be making rather a meal of it, advertising to a vulgar extent a charitable instinct that ought to be taken as read. Sporting a poppy in the middle of October, as I saw someone doing, is the sort of thing ripe for a magisterial rebuke from the celebrated superdecorator, wit, raconteur and cult figure Mr Nicky Haslam, in his landmark 'How Common' column. Needless to say, it is usually politicians who cannot wait to advertise their competitive regard for the Glorious Dead, off whose boots most of them would not be fit to lick the mud of Flanders fields. I would rather our politicians pressed the government to stop the traffic at the I 1 th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month irrespective of the day of the week on which it falls — and not just, as this year, when it happens conveniently to be a Sunday.
It is that time of year, too, when one is reminded of advancing middle age. First there is the obsessive desire to get the garden right for the winter, by spending the equivalent of the Albanian GDP at a garden centre, so that everything may bloom next summer. I never worried about this
before reaching the age of 40, and interpret my concern to maximise the wonders of nature as proof of an impending appointment with the Grim Reaper. Second, and not unrelated, is the visit to my doctor for a flu jab. Until two Christmases ago I thought these were for geriatrics. Then a brutal dose of flu felled me for ten days and prompted prolonged ruminations on how Mrs Heffer would spend her widowhood. What everyone is too tasteful to say, of course, is that this mania for prevention keeps unfit specimens alive and piles up the cost of the NHS. Now, with free fat pills coming, there won't even be so many fatal heart attacks to keep the bills down. We are forgetting our patriotic duty to die, and shall all be the poorer for it.
There is vast excitement in certain circles at the new dramatisation of The Way We Live Now, an excitement drummed up by half-educated snobs who believe Trollope to have been a great novelist, and this to be the greatest of his novels. That last point might well be true. However, I am always inclined to toss such people a copy of The Way of All Flesh to show them what
great late-Victorian fiction-writing was really about, but it would be pearls before swine. Even those Trollopes that people rave about — you know, the ones with all the bitchy clergymen — display all the author's faults and shortcomings. Pick one of his novels at random and spend an hour with it and you will find contrivance, repetition, shallowness and solecism on a heroic scale. So I brace myself for the orgy of self-congratulation among Trollopians when this series appears on our televisions. I suppose it will, at least, be tasteful and restrained by comparison with the Sodom and Gomorrah of merchandising, exploitation and manipulation we now face from the cultural swamp of Harry Potter.
The traditionalist in me suffered an enjoyable frisson when Mr 'Geoff' Hoon, the defence secretary, warned British Muslims not to join the Taleban because they might, among other things, face 'legal action' at home. Let us not mince our words: surely he means trials for treason, doesn't he? After all, if these people are British, and they choose to fight their own country, whatever else can their offence be called? Regrettably, we have abolished the death penalty for treason, as part of our determination to swallow foreign humanrights laws. However, with our Prime Minister talking of taking bin Laden dead rather than alive, it seems that all hope on that front might not be lost after all. I trust, though, that any traitors will not be cast into one of our jails with common criminals. In order to apply the full majesty of the law consistent with their offence, ostentatious incarceration in the Tower of London is the very least that they, and we, have a right to expect.
The misery of life is compounded by the Dean of St Catharine's College, Cambridge. He whines about drunken lady undergraduates running naked over the lawns and 'behaving badly'. This college, rather dull as I remember it, appears to have improved greatly since I attended the institution on the other side of Trumpington Street. The morning after a boat-club dinner, we at Corpus found an offensive slogan daubed on our college. The matter was rectified speedily, and no more heard of it, once it was strongly suspected that the handwriting was that of a very senior member of the college and university. He would be proud of these girls, and so, in the interests of the national sense of humour, should we all.
Previous page
