DIARY
CHRISTOPHER BOOKER ack in the mid-Sixties, when I briefly succeeded Randolph Churchill as the Spec- tator's press columnist, this paper was just about the only place where behind-the- scenes goings on in Fleet Street were publicly written about. In those days it was not the general custom for journalists to write about each other or the internal affairs of newspapers — whereas today it sometimes seems as if they write about little else. Parts of Fleet Street, such as the dismal Pendennis column in the Observer, are so obsessed with egotistical trivia about the media that they provide a particularly depressing example of 'the medium be- coming the message'. It seems that many journalists have so little interest in the real world that they see nothing odd in simply peddling their own trade gossip, as if it was of any interest to outsiders. Only rarely are the doings of journalists unusual enough to be genuinely worthy of a wider audience. Last week, for instance, I attended a little gathering at Brown's Hotel for the laun- ching of a book called No End of a Lesson, a collection of leading articles written by Charles Douglas-Home during his edi- torship of the Times before his death last year at the age of 48. Sir Laurens van der Post paid tribute to Douglas-Home's 'wholeness' as a man, and this is reflected in the range of subjects covered in the book, from the Falkands war to the ter- centenary of Bach. But in fact one of the most remarkable pieces of writing in the book is the introduction by Douglas- Home's widow Jessica, describing the courage with which her husband remained at his post during his final illness, conduct- ing editorial conferences lying on his back in the office or dictating leaders from his hospital bed. Here for once is a story about a journalist which stays in the mind.
What a curious mirror to the chang- ing mood of the times is provided by the Last Night of the Proms. Watching last Saturday's effort, it was hard to recall the frenetic neophilia of the early Seventies, when the BBC one year actually replaced the traditional Sea Songs and 'Land of Hope and Glory' with a fantasia on Beatles songs, and the unkempt long-haired audi- ence joined in a rendition of 'We Shall Overcome'. This year's promenaders, many in evening dress, looked more like a gang of genteelly festive Young Fogeys, as they decorously swayed through all the old favourites. The Henry Wood fantasia was even more 'traditional' than usual, includ- ing some rarely played passages which served as a showcase for individual in- strumentalists from the orchestra — a beautifully played solo by the chief cellist was one of the musical highlights of the
entire season. Even so, there was some- thing a little flat about this year's Last Night, typified by Raymond Leppard's worthy little speech commending the 'BBC Third Programme'. Maybe he spends little time in Britain these days, but someone might have told him the Third Programme was closed down in 1964.
Happy memories were evoked by P.J. Kavanagh's 'Life and letters' last week, with his description of the young people of Mantua gathering every evening — 'the noise is of an enormous open-air cocktail party in the arcaded 13th-century square'. Any traveller round the Mediterranean must have been struck by this attractive custom, whereby the inhabitants of a town come out at the end of the day to chat and walk up and down. Nowhere is it seen to better advantage than in the beautiful old traffic-free squares of Yugoslavia, where it is known as the korso. As J. A. Cuddon puts it in his splendid Companion Guide to Jugoslavia, the korso
is something more than a casual stroll; it is more like a parade or procession with observable patterns of movement and de- velopment and even, on occasion, unwritten rules. . . The young girls put on their finery, the young men spruce themselves up and children of all ages are brought out. Practi- cally the whole village or town appears to be involved. . . . It is an extremely sociable and healthy event which gives everyone an opportunity of meeting and generally airs human relationships.
In this context, I was once struck by Thomas de Quincey's account of his visit to meet Coleridge in Bridgewater. After tea, 'when the heat of the day had declined', they walked out into the streets where 'all the people of station and weight in the place . . . were abroad to enjoy the lovely summer evening'. Obviously long ago, in the days before the intimate social life of our own towns was disrupted by traffic and television, there was even a form of korso in England. What a far cry from the sad picture of Bath in 1986 conjured up in a letter to Monday's Times, in which the writer described how, on two recent even- ings running, he and his family found the
streets so filled with gangs of 'drunken youths hurling abuse and pushing us off the pavements' that they were forced to retreat back to safety in their hotel.
Just before the start of the cricket season I happened to meet at dinner Peter Roebuck, the newly appointed captain of Somerset. His chief worry seemed to be how he was going to handle his three star players, Richards, Garner and Botham. Last Sunday I could not bring myself to drive over to Taunton to attend the melan- choly occasion of the last match in which all three played for the county, amid tumultuous scenes of protest from anguished supporters. On Monday it was confirmed that the thoughtful and calculat- ing Roebuck, with a first in law from Cambridge, had played more than a mar- ginal part in the plan to eject the three stars in what is reckoned to be the best long- term interest of the club. But from Exmoor to the Mendips this unhappy affair has left a pall of gloom. For a cricket-lover, it has been an extraordinary privilege to live in Somerset in recent years, with the prospect: of seeing these three larger-than-life cricketers in action, pulling off some of the most remarkable feats in the history of the game — even though the record of the team as a whole has been lamentable. I have to hope that an omen for the future was our experience a month ago when, hearing at lunchtime that Somerset had been set the colossal task of scoring more than 300 to win on the last afternoon, we dashed over to Weston-super-Mare. With Botham and Richards, it seemed some spectacular cricket might be on the cards. In the event both were out cheaply to perfunctory shots, and it took some rather more intelligent battling from the worka- day Oxbridge graduates Roebuck and Marks to give Somerset a breathtaking win with five balls to go.
Can some astronomically literate read- er please solve a puzzle which has been bothering me throughout this past year of renewed interest in Halley's Comet? The two things we all learn about the comet in childhood are that it returns every 76 years, and that one of its most celebrated appearances was that coinciding with the Norman invasion in 1066, as recorded in the Bayeux Tapestry. Successive subtrac- tions of 76 from 1986 give us 1910, 1834, 1758 (the year of Halley's own observa- tion). So far, so good. But continuing the sequence backwards gives us 1606, 1530, 1454, 1378, 1302, 1226, 1150 and then 1074 — eight years askew from the Battle of Hastings. Where do my calculations err?
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