Notebook
At a school parents' meeting the subject for discussion is drugs. We are invited to search the bathrooms for old syringes and examine our children's shirt sleeves for bloodstains. A psychiatrist tells us that drug abuse among children has soared over the past Year. We should watch out for signs of listlessness and bloody-mindedness. It is all very scary. The best thing, we are advised, that we can do to protect our children is to be mean about pocket money. We are told a horror story of one child who gets £80 a month from its parents. We are also told that — apart from drugs, drink and sex — the main problem among children in London today is shop-lifting. This, too, is a vice that LS prevalent among children with too much money, which on the face of it seems odd, though it tallies with the fact that Arab ladies are so prone to it. Meanwhile, I am assured by my enormously rich friends that the rules concerning Capital Transfer Tax are a major cause of drug addiction among the jeunesse doree. Because parents are allowed to give away £2,000 a year tax free While they are alive, many feel obliged to do so, and their children feel obliged to spend it. Anyway, it is nice to be reassured that parsimony is a virtue.
What in life is seen as generosity in death may be perceived as meanness. I am thinking of Sir Charles Clore, who during his lifetime was famous for his gifts to charity. One can only admire a man who is prepared to part with his income for charitable purPoses. But when he dies, should he not think of his children? According to newspaper reports, Sir Charles left the bulk of his estimated £60 million estate to charities, and his son, Mr Alan Clore, is challenging the will. I have no doubt that the young Mr Clore already has much more money than he needs or probably deserves. But it must be most wounding to be suddenly disinherited. I am reminded of those mediaeval noblemen who on their deaths endowed chapels so that Masses could be , said for, them Sir Charles clearly wished to leave his mark upon the world,.to earn an enduring reputation for good works. By implication, he did not trust his son to carry on the tradition of generosity which he had begun. Perhaps he did not want his position as the first and greatest Clore to be challenged by his successors. Perhaps that is unfair. But I think I am on young Alan's side.
I have been planning to travel to Inverness from London, possibly putting my car on a train, Inquiries with British Rail have revealed an interesting anomaly. It is in fact cheaper to travel by sleeper with a car than to travel on the train without it -if there are four of you, that is. It costs four adults £126.40 to make the journey by ordinary second-class sleeper. If they travelled by Motorail with their car, however, it would cost them ony £112,70. Indeed, if they had no car, it would still pay them to hire one from Godfrey Davis even if they had no intention of driving it. If they hired the car at the point of departure, put it on the train, and relinquished it upon arrival, they would have saved just under £1.00.
This has not been a yery good week for the Royal Family. First there was the rather ludicrous affair of Captain Mark Phillips and his equestrian sponsorship arrangement with British Leyland. In his inimitably ham-fisted way, he offered as an excuse — when no excuse was needed — that he and Princess Anne were 'a young couple with a mortgage'. The mortgage, it turned oat, was not for Gatcombe Park, which the Queen had paid for, but for a horses' swimming pool. Then there was Princess Margaret in Chicago reportedly describing the Irish as 'pigs' — hardly an outrageous comment if it was the murderers of Lord Mountbatten she had in mind. She denied the report as it appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, but was hardly helped by an offical of the British Consulate in Chicago, who told the Daily Mail about the offending columnist; 'The journalist has a reputation for writing a responsible column. He is not someone who has to run a lie to sell his column,' But to revert to Captain Phillips's mortagage, he was very lucky to have got it. Mortgages are becoming extremely difficult to obtain, which may be why schoolchildren are being invited to study them as an 0-level subject, The boom in London house prices is accordingly coming to an end, and estate agents, it seems, are beginning to become desperate. A colleague who has been house-hunting has received the latest list of an Islington agents called Stickley and Kent. It contains the following description: 125,000 (or offer) Buckingham Road . . . a superb opportunity to purchase and modernise a three-storey non-basement semi. . . The property, which is subject to a dangerous structure notice and a closing order, retains many period features.' It is of some comfort, I suppose, to know that the roof which falls on your head is a 'period' one.
A new generation of 'licensed walkers' may be about to be born. The county council of Gwent in Wales has announced a new twoday course on walking in the countryside. It costs £3.00 and is part of what is called a 'strategy' for improving opportunities for walking. Despite the contraction of the countryside, the opportunities do remain considerable, and it would be interesting to know how the council hopes to improve them. The course involves instruction in map-reading, compass work, the laws of the countryside, safety and — more ominously — first aid. Soon, 1 expect, you will be required to pass an exam before you are allowed out in military formation on to the Welsh hills. In the meantime, I will continue to wander lonely as a cloud.
This is the worst possible moment to be writing about The Times — just a few hours before the midnight deadline by which time the future of the paper will have been decided. But how can one ignore the subject? The mere idea that a trade union could be prepared to sacrifice thousands of jobs and five papers — including the most famous daily newspaper in the world — because of a narrowing in the gap between its members' earnings and those of another group of workers is almost impossible to understand. The NGA says that reducing a differential is more than flesh and blood can stand', and one can even understand their irritation. But the death of The Times, the Sunday Times, the TLS and the educational supplements would require a somewhat better justification. I hope that by the time you are able to read this there will have been an agreement to bring the papers out again. I also hope that such an agreement, if it exists, will be stable enough to survive. And I hope that whatever the outcome of this unbearably long and depressing dispute, nobody will feel pleased with himself. It was not the Holy War that the management thought it was, and, in any case, nobody will have won it, Independent Television may soon be broadcasting again. But according to Miss Angela Rippon on the BBC, it will initially be providing an 'emergency service'. What is an emergency service? It is, she tells us, a diet of old films and repeats. Perhaps the word 'emergency' needs re-defining.
Alexander Chancellor
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