Notebook
I will begin by expressing my one anxiety about the Royal marriage arrangements, confident that it is one which many others share. It concerns the bride's stepmother and her stepgrandmother, Raine Spencer and Barbara Cartland. If they are to be kept safely in the background, I suspect that guarantees no less binding than those imposed on Mr Rupert Murdoch when he bought The Times will be required. If a Special Act of Parliament is necessary, so be it, For it would be more than a little unfair on everybody if these two absurdly theatrical ladies were permitted to turn a moving national celebration into a pantomime. Perhaps I am excessively influenced by the fairy-tale atmosphere which the press always tries to evoke on these occasions, but I am beginning to suspect them of being witches with sinister powers to cast a shadow over the joyous pageant to which We are all looking forward. I shrank in terror when the present Lady Spencer suddenly appeared on television last Tuesday at the side of her amiable husband and started taking over the interview in her bright, articulate manner. I began to curse Whom ever it was that thought up the idea of having a European Architectural Heritage Year in 1975 and of putting the susceptible Lord Spencer on the same committee as !tame. To make matters worse, an ITV reporter started referring to the couple as the parents' of the bride. Come home, Mrs Shand Kydd, your country needs you.
But in fairy tales, innocence and goodness normally triumph, and so they will this time. The opinion that Lady Diana Spencer is about as suitable for her new role as it is Possible to be is more, or less nniversally held. She has been publicly extolled not only for her charm and for her beauty, but for clinical attributes to which in normal circumstances it might be thought improper tO refer. Her virginity, for example, is ,approvingly discussed in the popular press. She has been pronounced physically sound to produce children,' according to Nigel Dempster in the Daily Mail. And even her father proudly informed television viewers that as a baby she had been 'a superb physical specimen'. Well, she still looks fine, and she seems to possess many other qualities all of which have been exhaustively discussed in thC newspapers, Not least among them is her. .Englishness, It is unlikely that the riti Bsh public, in its present insular mood, would have warmed so much to a European bode. Her composure and good manners in the face of press harassment have also been rightly praised. She seems, in short. wonderful; and even though, as Queen Victoria said, 'people really marry far too much. It's such a lottery after all', celibacy was never a serious option for the Prince of Wales and he seems to have made an excellent choice.
It is diMcult to know how much credit should go to the press for this excellent Royal match. As the Guardian pointed out in its leading article on Wednesday, 'it was only three weeks ago that they [Prince Charles and Lady Diana] became as wellinformed about their engagement as Fleet Street was several months ago'. The relentless pursuit of Lady Diana by reporters, and the harassment of the Royal Family on holiday at Sandringham, must have concentrated the Prince's mind. Not that such harassment is anything new. Queen Victoria once complained at Balmoral that even 'in this complete solitude we were spied upon by impudently insensitive reporters who followed us everywhere,' But Prince Charles was allowed remarkably little time for his wooing. In contrast, the Queen and Prince Philip were able to see each other in complete privacy for a couple of years before their engagement was announced.
The paperback edition of Philip Howard's collection of excellent essays on the misuse of words (New Words for Old, Unwin Paperbacks, £1.75) arrived in our office last week. It was accompanied by a promotional leaflet which starts with an admonition from a reviewer in Country Life: 'When you have read this fascinating book you will hesitate before you write another word, perhaps before you _even speak again.' This is probably quite good advice for all of us, but the author of the leaflet is undeterred and proceeds in sprightly fashion to sing the praises of the book, ending with the words: 'There are lessons to be learned as well as jokes to be shared in this witty, informative and scholarly commentary on the way man talks mumbo-jumbo unto man.' Well, there are lessons to be learned everywhere — even in public relations leaflets, What, for example, is the real meaning of the word 'mumbo-jumbo'? I have it on the authority of our new literary editor and African expert, Mr Patrick Marnham, that mambojumbo is a word employed by the people of Senegambia to describe an idol used to discipline fractious wives. Mumbo-jumbo was a masked figure who would visit villages causing terror among the women. He would eventually select the most nagging of the wives and beat her. All the other women would also beat her — with even greater vigour, it was noted by Mungo Park, than by Mumbo-jumbo himself. It is hard to imagine how a word with such a precise meaning could have come to be used by speakers of English, rather than Mandingo, to describe confused and incomprehensible language. This popular usage, in fact, is not admitted by the Oxford English Dictionary, which recognises the word only in its original meaning or as a way of referring to any 'object of unintelligent veneration'. Perhaps Mr Howard should have included it in his book. He did, in fact, refer to it in a little article in The Times last April, when he was describing how the word 'jumbo' had come to be used incorrectly to refer to elephants and other large objects like aeroplanes and hamburgers. The best explanation of its origin that he could offer was that it 'probably derived from the second element of mumbojumbo'.
Three weeks ago I reported on this page that a young man had been fined £100 for writing his name in pencil on a London Transport bench. Christopher Howse, the columnist of the Catholic Herald, has now supplied me with a more recent example of the sort of preposterous sentence that magistrates nowadays seem to like meting out to the young. In Portsmouth earlier this month a 14-year-old boy was put under supervision for two years and ordered to pay £387 in costs to the RSPCA for kicking a hedgehog to death. Mr Howse explained: 'The boy did not like hedgehogs. He denied causing the animal unnecessary suffering. "It did not have any use. It was rolled up and 'I thought it was dead anyway". A post mortern found the hedgehog died of internal injuries. The Court's chairman, the Reverend John Sturges, said: "Onr society says we must treat living creatures with care, and you must re-examine your values" '. Mr Sturges was right to encourage better treatmentof hedgehogs ,which are charming animals, but the values of the RSPCA could also do with some re-examination. According to Mr Howse, soon after its Portsmouth triumph the Society was landed with cpsts when it failed in the prosecution of a woman alleged to have frightened a mouse by trying to feed it to her snake. The mouse was removed to safety, but the snake died of starvation.
Alexander Chancellor
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