DIARY
NICHOLAS COLERIDGE For the last 18 months I have been renting a cottage near Bourton-on-the- Water, in a little hamlet as pretty and unspoiled as any in Gloucestershire. It is off the telephone, has no television, but plenty of hot water and a red telephone box on the village green of the kind admired by Spectator readers. It is the perfect place in which to flop after a week in London. On Saturday morning the postman delivered me for the first time a free newspaper, the Gloucestershire Coun- try News, which is subtitled The Newspap- er for Gloucestershire ratepayers'. I sup- pose this means that it is paid for by Gloucestershire ratepayers too, but I hard- ly expect to be asked whether I want things before I'm made to pay for them. A large chunk of this scruffy newspaper is given over to an article about how good it is. 'Style has been said to be something that is easy to recognise but hard to define,' swanks the editorial. 'Our new style is both recognisable and with a clear definition. By adopting a common colour scheme on all of our vehicles, and by using a standard typeface on our letters, posters and pub- lications, we aim to put across the message that it is the County Council as a whole that is at your service and serving you. To use the admen's jargon, it's part of our corporate image.' The new Gloucester- shire corporate colour, an unpleasant mus- tard yellow, will be familiar to anyone who has seen Lord Cowdray's estate cottages near Midhurst in Sussex. But what depress- es me more is the fact that Gloucestershire, still one of the loveliest counties in Eng- land, should have a corporate image at all. Why does it need one? To encourage more people to move there? To distinguish it from Oxfordshire and Herefordshire? Why Should the chief of the fire service have to write on exactly the same writing paper as the curator of the local museum? Clearly the county council has been talked into this massive waste of money by one of the dozens of corporate image advisers who now stalk the land, jazzing up perfectly' good letter headings with silly symbols. Perhaps the same people are also responsi- ble for jazzing up Gloucestershire's librar- ies. The same issue of the free newspaper tells us that 'the days of silent libraries full of dusty books are long gone'. Instead, we're assured, local libraries have 'black- boards to draw on and beanbags to climb over'.
I. drove into Cirencester in search of kitchen chairs. The expedition was not a success. Virtually no chairs are to be found anywhere in Cirencester. 'If you'd come in a month ago we had several sets,' said the owners of the dozens of antique shops Clustered around the church of St John the Baptist. 'Even a fortnight back, there were chairs. But lately they've just walked out of the shop, I don't know why.' Perhaps it is the financial crash. People who were about to embark upon long safaris in Kenya, or to snap up a string of polo ponies, have decided to take their stockbrokers' advice and 'sit it out', necessitating vast quantities of extra kitchen chairs. Alistair Cooke, in his Letter from America, told us that nearly half the people with a winter cruise booked out of West Coast ports have cancelled, even when this means forfeiting a large deposit. We should also, he warned, ex- pect a transatlantic dip in the art market, though he said nothing about kitchen chairs. Lunching at Sotheby's this week I detected only the faintest signs of nerves about the price of art. One of my hosts had just been taking a sale of modern British paintings, and although quite a lot of pictures were bought in unsold, she said they were picked up by dealers for respect- able prices immediately afterwards. We discussed the great mystery of modern antique shops: why is it that every single thing you really like is priced at £1,250? It does not matter what it is, a sideboard, a Chinese screen, a dumb waiter, a garden urn, everything good for sale from the New Kings Road to Cirencester costs precisely £1,250. Perhaps, we agreed, it is simply the current psychological pain barrier, beyond which casual buyers will not go, like £4.99 on a market stall. My colleague Nicola Shulman has pointed out that dinner for two in London all of a sudden costs £60, wherever and whatever you eat, whereas 18 months ago the bill was always £42.50.
'VI (Econ) are mounting a takeover bid.' Furniture priced at £1,250 is clearly the £4.99 of the New Kings Road.
0 n my way to London from Glouces- tershire, I was flagged down by two rather obnoxious policemen on the Woodstock Road. They were holding devices like loud-hailers, and told me I had been speeding along at 43 mph in a 30 mph zone. Since this is apparently an endorsable offence, I elected to present my driving licence to the Chelsea police within seven days. The duty officer at Chelsea was not impressed. 'Those Oxford police,' he said, raising his eyes to heaven 'it's amazing, isn't it, that they have enough spare time to bother with this. They're real timewasters.' Some weeks later I received a letter from the Oxfordshire county court, accusing me of failing to present my licence for endorse- ment. The Chelsea police, it emerged, had simply not bothered to forward it, so the whole case was dropped. The lesson from the episode is this: if you are ever stopped by a country policeman, you should make absolutely sure that the big-time, over- stretched Metropolitan force get involved.
Returning to my office from lunch, I find the journalist Victoria Mather wandering about with a tape recorder, interviewing my colleagues on how to rebuff men at dances. She is preparing an item for the Loose Ends radio programme, linked in some tangential way to the sergeant court-martialled for striking his colonel at a party on the Falkland Islands. In due course she strolls over to my desk and insists I tell a silly story about my experiences at the Bembridge Dinghy Club ball in 1968. When this is broadcast the following morning I am shocked by my plummy accent. For years I have thought I had a modern classless BBC accent; now I discover myself sounding exactly like the luckless colonel giving evidence at the court-martial.
Iarrived too early for the Lord Mayor's banquet and decided to park outside St Paul's Cathedral and stroll about inside for a quarter of an hour. When I returned to my car, two louts were leaning against the bonnet in a menacing way. Their jeering at my evening dress turned into a scuffle, and then they began to pound my right arm with iron-fisted 'kangaroo' punches before running away. I wish I could say that I had given chase, either on foot or better still in my car. But I didn't. Instead I sat nauseously in the passenger seat, ' beaten and bowed, and cursing myself for always being so punctual.
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