DIARY
PEREGRINE WORSTHORNE Prompted by my Stoic contemporary Lord Quinton's appreciation of Freddie Ayer (`Logic in high• gear', 8 July) in this Journal, I realised that another of my school friends ornaments the Upper House — Wayland Hilton Young, as he then was. His route to ennoblement was direct; he inherited from his father the title of Lord Kennet of the Dene and although under the Peerage Act he had an opportunity to renounce it (and furthermore put a notice in the Times to the effect that he and his wife wished to be known as 'Mr and Mrs Wayland Young') his resolution neverthe- less faltered and he sits in the Lords. Wayland is one of the cleverest of men but somehow his abilities were unfocused and have not brought him the professional rewards that should have been his due. My host, Euan Graham, in south-west France, from where I am writing this Diary, has now reminded me of another school con- temporary, the Noble Lord, Lord Hender- son of Brompton, behind whose metropoli- tan appellation (doubtless derived from having a house in Pelham Street) lies the curly-headed angel — as he then was Peter Henderson. Badly disabled in the last war, and 'the Room' at Lloyd's proving too onerous, he left and joined the Parlia- ment Office (i.e. the Secretariat of the House of Lords). The Lords at that time was an assembly especially susceptible to the cult of the Rupert Brooke-type hero and he was able to deploy his highly developed talent, already apparent at Stowe, of imbuing any advice he gave with an almost transcendental quality, which inspired, in the bosom of the recipients, a feeling of gratitude and sympathy amount- ing in some cases to devotion. This was demonstrably the case in his dealings with senior Tories; he showed early on a charac- teristic prescience by assisting Lord Hail- sham out of a sartorial predicament by volunteering to lend him a pair of evening socks. These traits assured him a rapid ascent of the official ladder and, having overtaken several lesser folk, including my host, he became Clerk of the Parliaments. Normally this office carries a KCB but, as Euan predicted at the time, this routine award was followed on his retirement by a Peerage, for which there is only one precedent this century — Jack Baddeley in the late 1940s. Events now took an in- teresting turn. Baddeley, under a self- imposed ordinance, never spoke in the House. But Henderson rapidly established himself as a procedural guru on the cross benches and chivvied the present Govern- ment on a wide variety of topics. He also, as one would expect, laudably initiated debates on disablement and kindred mat- ters. To mix metaphors, I think it is fair to say he became a thorn in the palm of the hand that fed him, and it seems unlikely
that any future Clerk of the Parliaments will be made a life peer this century or the next.
Scarcely an hour goes by without one of the ravishing and witty Graham girls — 'I am so hungry I am ravishing' — using the word naff. Neither Sarah nor Alix is prepared to give me a staightforward de- finition. As far as I can gather, anything pretentious or flashy is naff. Thus a pink Deux Chevaux is naff. Or a plastic Swatch watch. So, is the word a fashionable synonym for vulgar? Not quite, since Lon- don taxi drivers, it seems, can often be heard describing a piece of bad driving as naff. All classes use the word, shop girls as much as debutantes. In that respect it is not at all a repeat of the U and non-U nonsense, although an element of snob- bery is not altogether absent. For example, the girls definitely think that fish knives are naff, at any rate when used for fish cakes. How does naff differ from that fashionable 1960s word 'square'? Square simply meant out of date and dull, whereas naff suggests something a bit meretricious as well. Lord Hailsham, they say, is square; Cecil Par- kinson, naff. Clearly, the word does have a meaning and although the two girls cannot define it, they never disagree with each other about how to apply it. When I ask whether I am naff, the reply is: 'What a naff question.' It would be fascinating to know where or how the word originated. Apparently not in America, where it is unheard of. In some corner of the English pop world, perhaps. Manifestly, however, the word has taken on a life of its own and will remain popular, I expect, among all kinds of young people so long as it con- tinues to baffle, intrigue and exclude older generations.
0 n the way to my local underground, Fulham Broadway, there is a giant piece of modern sculpture — a criss-cross of painted steel planks — which has been erected in the middle of the pavement. In theory, I could shut my eyes so as to avoid having to see it. But then I would run the risk of treading on another and even worse
example of street pollution: dog excre- ment. So there is really no choice but to have one's sensibilities outraged day after day after day. Modern architecture im- poses itself in the same tyrannical way. There is no escape. Nobody has to go and look at paintings of which they disapprove. Francis Bacon, for example, does not impose his ugly view of the world on unwilling, captive viewers. Anyone likely to be shocked can stay away from the exhibition. But architects put up buildings which people cannot avoid seeing or even working or living in, however painful or shocking that experience may be Surely this extra responsibility should give them pause. Whereas painters or poets or musi- cians are entirely justified in producing works of art to please themselves and their muse, architects or sculptors should have no comparable freedom; at any rate if their work is for all to see whether they like it or not. Prince Charles is right to express anger. These are matters not so much of taste as of morals.
Avery old friend of mine, Dickie Muir, who for years owned La Popote in Walton Street, has just died, without re- ceiving his due in obituaries. (The only one, by Anthony Blond — a much better writer than publisher — was in the Inde- pendent.) Dickie was a very remarkable character, in spite of being an unremark- able restaurateur. If I say he was out of a novel by Simon Raven, that might give slightly the wrong impression. For Dickie was scrupulously honest and moral. But his morality was of a sort that owed everything to classical Greece and nothing to modern Britain. In a way he never grew up; that is to say, he went on doing what his money had always allowed him to do: live like a gentleman. His enchanting wife, Patricia, a woman of supreme taste, helped crucially by creating a succession of country houses in which they could entertain to perfection. Nothing here, I suppose, for the obituarists to get excited about. But for his friends there was something exceedingly rare: flawless style, as much in his clothes as in his conversation. Virtually unshockable, the only thing that made him angry was bad manners. In the old days the Times took pride in memorialising such non- utilitarian adornments to the social scene in spite of — almost because of — their having 'done' nothing. Nowadays, it seems, only the obituary columns of the Independent have space for people whose characters are more important than their achievements. How sad. Recognising the importance of the unimportant used to be what made Britain a more civilised society to live in than the United States.
Previous page
