DIARY KEITH WATERHOUSE
Ilike to have Radio 3 on in the back- ground while I work (the Third Programme as I still call it). To this end, I have an old but entirely serviceable radio and a couple of speakers permanently churning out my Mozart and Mahler wallpaper. Of late I have been vaguely aware of a voice chuntering on from time to time about medium wave, VHF, aerials and other highly technical matters. Having taken not the slightest notice of this mumbo-jumbo, it was with some surprise last Saturday that I switched on my radio to receive only a blast of silence. The Radio Times explains, 'From this week, the MW frequency is no longer available to Radio 3. Programmes will be broadcast on FM only.' I gather I could get this FM, whatever it may be, if I had an aerial, but I don't have an aerial. Since I want only music while I work, the other sta- tions are useless to me. I therefore have to buy a new radio. Perhaps that's the Gov- ernment's idea — a good boost for the import trade, but I feel very aggrieved. It is as if the gas company were to announce, 'Owing to the fact that we now have to cir- culate our gas through the pipes in an anti- clockwise direction rather than clockwise, the hot plate on your old cooker won't work any more unless you get a man in.' Will Radio 3 gas be any better? I doubt it. And another thing. Thirty days of the sum- mer, between 11 a.m. and 7 p.m., will be yielded to cricket. The sound of leather on willow may be music to some, but you can't type to it.
As one gets older, one has to square up, with increasing frequency, to the
melancholy duty of writing the obituaries of one's friends. Unless the subject is a VIP, when his obituary will have been lying in state in the newspaper morgues for months or even years, it is usually a hurried busi- ness, and always an exercise in getting a quart into a pint pot. Last week it was the turn of just about my oldest friend, Guy Deghy, actor and writer. There was one story I should like to have crammed in, since it sums up what character actors have to put up with. Guy, who with his middle- European background specialised in for- eign baddies, was being considered for a part by the American director Stanley Donen, who asked him, 'Can you do a Hungarian accent?' To one whose last assignment had been to play an Austrian of Dutch extraction who has spent many years in Paris, this was child's play. He explained, 'I am Hungarian by birth, Mr Donen. I lived in Budapest until I was in my late twenties."Yes, but can you do the accent?' 'I am speaking to you now in a Hungarian accent, Mr Donen. It is my natural accent.' 'But can you sustain it?'
The tribulations of the banks are a source of keen satisfaction to disgruntled customers, although we all know who will pay for their bungling misjudgments in the end. I was particularly pleased to see that profits for my own bank, Barclays, are 30 per cent down on last year. A few weeks ago, on the eve of a trip to Australia, I despatched my assistant to a local branch of Barclays to pick up the travellers' cheques she had ordered for me. Nothing doing — the cheques had to be signed by the purchaser, in front of the cashier, before they could leave the bank. In vain did she point out that I was a small busi- ness, a limited company, and that compa- nies employ people to do that sort of thing for them. In vain, also, did she offer them a letter of indemnity in case she was mugged on the way home (no concern of theirs, if the cheques were unsigned). There was nothing for it: finally I had to go round to the bank myself. But I was childishly deter- mined to have one small victory .,- nothing would induce me to sign my cheques in front of the invigilating cashier. I asked her, 'When Sir John Quinton goes off to some tinpot republic to lend them the odd £20 million, does he have to go to a bank counter and sign his travellers' cheques under the eye of a cashier?' Who's Sir John Quinton?' He's your chairman.' In that case, I don't suppose he does.' Right then, hand them over.' Of course, the bank was to get its own back — banks always do. When I came to cash in my surplus Aus- tralian dollars, they insisted on milking off a £5 service charge, for all that they had sold them to me in the first place and that they were already profiting handsomely from the six cents to the pound difference between the selling and the buying price.
It's harder to understand than Law for the Poor.
Last week's Save Our Libraries day was not an unqualified success for its campaign- ers. The trouble is that librarians are now tarred heavily with the loony local govern- ment brush, and the public, or anyway that section of the public that writes leading articles for newspapers, holds them to blame for removing allegedly sexist, racist, elitist etc. material from the shelves and for squandering 'resources' on such fripperies as toy libraries, computerware and adminis- tration when they should be buying books. Another charge is that anyway libraries these days are largely given over to airport novels — Bryan Appleyard in the Sunday Times worked out that we are paying £1.32 per head per year to enable library users to read the likes of Jackie Collins and Jeffrey Archer. But wasn't it ever thus? Not if you go back to Andrew Carnegie perhaps, but I have a vivid image of public library shelves in the Thirties and they were stuffed with the works of Ruby M. Ayres, Annie S. Swan, Ethel M. Dell, Edgar Wallace, Jef- fery Farnol. Aerodrome novels all.
Iam delighted to find that one more edi- tion of the late Cyril Ray's Compleat Imbiber, that Enquire Within About the Good Things of Life, is to be published in the autumn — so delighted that I have agreed to write the introduction, for all that I know nothing about wine except the tip Cyril once gave me, which was always to buy my champagne at Waitrose. He had got most of the compiling and gathering-in done before his last illness, and the book is being helped to the press in the good hands of Elizabeth Ray. This will most likely be the last Imbiber, so it should complete the series. Those lucky enough to own the set should lay it down for their children — the first 12 editions, published 1956-71, went for 0,400 at Sotheby's last year. Did any- one, by the way, ever go out with more style than Cyril? His memorial, as provided for in his will, was a Bollinger party at Brooks's. Now that didn't come from Wait- rose.
More political correctitude. A corre- spondent draws my attention to the Be-Ro Cook Book, or to give it its full title, Home Recipes With Be-Ro Flour. I remember it well. A sepia, flour-dusted copy of this work was often at my mother's elbow on baking day. My correspondent reports that her grandmother used to refer to it fre- quently for the Be-Ro recipe for ginger- bread men which she made for her grand- children. On looking up the same recipe in the latest, 38th edition, however, it was to find that the Be-Ro gingerbread men have now become gingerbread people.
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