Tile Questing Vole
Encouraged by the success of her memoirs, which have captivated the nation thanks both to their literary excellence and the glittering launch party, Lady Annabel Goldsmith is planning a follow-up book. This volume will be a biography — or homage, if you will — to her late dog, Copper. Among the mongrel's endearing eccentricities was that, according to Lady Annabel, he learnt to distinguish between different numbered buses, and would wait to hop aboard the right one to go to the pub, where he had trained locals to buy him drinks. Once, he took the family cat along and got it tipsy. Lady Annabel's daughter, India Jane (by her first husband Mark Birley) will provide illustrations.
While we're at it, what a brilliant scoop by my colleague Taki, who revealed in his review in the London Evening Standard of Lady Annabel's book that he had staggered drunkenly out of the aforementioned glittering launch party and found himself playing high-stakes poker until 6 a.m. with Lady Annabel's son Zac. He seems to have been cleaned out. This veteran gambler had no idea at the time, he confesses, that Zac is a finalist in the world poker championships.
But'more to the point. is A.N. Wilson's entertaining new novel set in the newspaper world, My Name Is Legion, a roman a clef? Everyone except A.N. Wilson seems to think so, and this shy and diffident man has already been forced to fend off accusations that he has included in his story a character based on his saturnine successor as literary editor of the London Evening Standard, David Sexton. He is wise to do so. Mr Sexton discerned
— honi soit qui mal y pense, some will think — a likeness of himself in his ex-girlfriend Amanda Craig's novel A Vicious Circle, and kicked up such a stink that copies had to be recalled. For the record, this rodent's perusal of the manuscript produced no obvious Sextons, but a small portfolio of other, glancing, likenesses will keep us all entertained around publication date.
Good taste corner. 'I am sure all of us were shocked by the tragedy that hit the Morecambe Bay cocklers recently,' writes Nigel Slater in the Observer's food magazine. 'Appalled and saddened by the loss of life,' he continues, 'I also found myself stunned by the sheer quantity of
shellfish involved — literally millions are dug from the sand each year. Now, I love a juicy little cockle and don't eat them nearly often enough, but most of those I do come across are preserved in vinegary brine. So where do all the fresh ones go? We sent Rachel Cooke to explore the case of the disappearing shellfish. .
more jollity is to be found in Oxford Today magazine — where Dylan Thomas's biographer Andrew Lycett recalls amusingly the relationship between the drunk Welsh poet and the starchy historian A.J.P. Taylor. Taylor invited Thomas to stay for a week. He hung on for a month — and by the end Taylor, according to his memoirs, had to ration access to his beer barrel on the grounds that his guest was helping himself to '15 or 20 pints' daily. As he was leaving, Thomas announced he had lost his return ticket and hit his host up for a non-returnable loan of two quid. Taylor hoped he'd never see Thomas again. No such luck. A decade later, Dylan became the chief protégé of poor old Taylor's wife, and spent eight years sponging off her. Gratitude? Some hope. When she served him a dish of jugged hare, he 'wavered before condescending to "eat the hare of the bitch that dogs me".'
Athought. Spare one, please, for the not particularly good pop singer, aphorist and pocket Aussie philosopher Peter Andre. We well remember his
humiliation on A Celebrity . . . Get Me Out Of Here! when his soon-to-be-is-sheisn't-she girlfriend, 34DD Jordan, real name Katie Price, likened the contents of his boxer shorts to an 'acorn'. We remember, too, his emergence to proclaim in an interview with a red-top organ of record: 'My Acorn Is Mighty Oak.' Now an ex-girlfriend breaks cover to liken the offending part to a 'small chipolata', adding that Mr Andre has whatever the male equivalent of a 'Brazilian' is. Isn't it horrible? From something pigs eat to something you eat made of pigs. Can the metaphor ombudsman or someone have a word?
Wc yield to none in our admiration for Adam Helliker, the veteran gossip writer described by one acquaintance as resembling 'a well-sucked thumb'. But when he casts nasturtiums on the editor of this very magazine, writing — the cheek of the blighter! — a paragraph suggesting that Mr Johnson's 'rambling after-dinner speech' at the Savoy the other night was down to overindulgence in vintage Krug, rusty swords must leap from their scabbards. Need this column be driven to recall the sight, one enchanted evening in Kensington, of the very top of Mr Hellikees empurpled head peeping above the sill of a black cab on the floor of which he had chosen to sit, not trusting the stability of the seat? Need it recall his ejection from same cab? 'Attack that bloody Helliker!' says Mr Johnson. No. Let peace break out.
we yield, conversely, to some in our admiration for the former Conservative leader Ia(i)n Duncan Smith. But only some. (My sometime colleague Bruce Anderson, for example.) Ole Dunkers has had some tough times, but he has come through them, even appearing, apparently, in a 'shed' with somebody called Johnny Vaughan. Now his gorgeous wife, Bets(e)y, has been cleared of impropriety over their office arrangements. And it has just been announced that Mr Duncan Smith's novel, The Devil's Tune, will not be released in paperback, the better to make the unautographed hardback a collector's item. Cause for double celebration.
rrl his week, incidentally, we find space 1 too scant for extensive mention of the memoirs of the Tory MP for Solihull, John Taylor. Please Stay To The Adjournment (Brewin Books, £13.95) is. however, a cracking read, and a subject we will take trouble to address at greater length next week. It charts Mr Taylor's trajectory from Solihull Borough Council to being a minister in the DTI, and beyond — as well as finding time to take in his other interests: ancient monuments, cricket, golf and islands.
popular Party. Time for a change of 1 name? Just a thought.
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