Spectator peregrinations

I would like to have been the only diary-writer not reporting from Ascot last week. Having lived there for many years I usually like to be somewhere else when the hordes of opulent people descend on the place. The only inducement for me to be there is my mother's cooking which excels itself at Ascot week lunch parties. I went to a sort of Ascot preview by going to Brands Hatch the previous weekend. Motor-cycling enthusiasts, with sartorial adjustments, seem rather like the people who go to Ascot. They travel in conspicuous style. Leaving Ascot, you get the same feeling when trapped by chauffeur-driven Bentleys on the M4 as you do when the easy-riders come roaring out of the Brands Hatch track. And it is probably as serious to be in the pits without a leather jacket as it is to be in the Royal Enclosure without a top hat. They have the same fixation for competition and conformity and they're nearly all layabouts — living off expense accounts rather than the Welfare State. I don't want to put Sir Bernard Waley-Cohen, former Lord Mayor of London, in this extravagant category. Every year he sits or stands on the same concrete step at the end of the row next to the Royal Box, so that he doesn't have to look over other people's heads. His family have an unassailable hold on that end of the stand. I may be going motor-cycling again soon to look for a leather-jacketed equivalent.

Morose

Returning from Ascot I went to Bevis Hillier's 'Austerity Binge' on the roof garden of Biba — formerly Derry and Toms — rather a good setting for an attempt to revive the 'forties'fifties life-style. Mr Hillier was wearing a particularly bizarre outfit, with a multi-coloured bow-tie, and there were enougn people in curious garb for my own Ascot tails to go unnoticed — until I met Michael Leapman, the Times diarist, at the door. "Ah, got yourself a new job?" he said anticipating as always the demise of The Spectator's staff. "Who are you waiting for?" Mr Leapman frequently uses his diary to describe his own elegant wardrobe — his denim suit, his velvet jacket and the long, woolly underwear he took to Moscow. And he once described me as a morose Old Etonian gossip-columnist. I would just like to say that, given a really boring occasion, he can look even moroser than I do.

Friends and absentees

Who but an American painter/writer would collect English friends as if they were museum pieces? Launching her book, Friends and Memories at a Foyles lunch Fleur Cowles numbered as her friends more well-known faces than most people could remember — like Lord Wolfenden, Hermione Ging°ld, James Stewart, Lady Gaitskell, Dulcie Gray, the Duke of Grafton, Roy Strong, Feliks Topolski, Ruskin Spear, Lord Shawcross, Norman St JohnStevas, Lord Eccles and myself. Absent friends included Presidents Truman and Nasser. I remember the last time I was in her flat in the Albany (wait for the letters from toffee-nosed Cyril Ray), Burl Ives, the vast American singer, was demonstrating that for a man of his size, the most economical way of walking is simply to lean forward and remember to push a foot forward every so often. Miss Cowles is lucky that her elaborate Japanese inlaid furniture is still intact. If Cyril Ray had come along he might easily have been trampled underfoot.

East of Suez

Desmond Wettern of the Sunday Telegraph reports that naval wives will soon be allowed to follow their husbands, on separate ships, when they go to the Far East. But the wives will not be doing the stretch from Malta through the Suez Canal and across the Indian Ocean — because, they say, there are few opportunities to go ashore. How naive can you get? This is an Anglo-Arab pact to protect the Egyptian filthy postcard industry.

Goodbye Jim

I am saddened to hear that Jim Pestridge, presenter of Radio 4's Sunday morning motoring programme, has started to call himself James Pestridge. Jim Pestridge was the best radio name since Eccles. I will not be able to listen to this weekly drivel any more.

Taken for a ride

For one person-at least the euphemism "taking the dog for a walk" does not apply. I saw a woman lift her dog — an ageing immobile Pekinese — out of her wheeled shopping basket beside the dog loo in Cheyne Gardens. Afterwards she picked it up by the scruff of the neck and wheeled it home again.

Colonised

Last week I heard a variation on Dean Acheson's much-abused aphorism which even that plain-speaking Secretary of State could not have forecast at the time of the Truman administration. Giving the Fifth STC communications lecture at the Savoy, John Garnett, Director of the Industrial Society, said "Britain has not only lost an Empire. We've become a colony of the Arabs — in the space of one generation." It even raised a smile from his host, Lord Caccia, Chairman of STC (Standard Telephones and Cables) and formerly British Ambassador in Washington.

Parliamentary painter

Nicholas Ridley's piece in The Spectator last week on the Middle East was not the only creative by-product of his recent peregrinations in that part of the world. On publication day I found him at the Anthony Fortescue Galleries in Walton Street opening an exhibition of his own watercolours — with gasps of admiration from parliamentary colleagues Anthony Royle, Lord DuncanSandys, Nigel Lawson, Sir Anthony Meyer and Enoch Powell. Clearly he is a rapid worker. If I remember right most of the pictures at his last show three years agO were painted when he was still a Minister in Mr Heath's Government.

Overspill

The policeman who was given the task of clearing the enormous overspill' of journalists from the pavement outside the Lucan inquest tells me it's the most boring one he can remember. He recalls with nostalgia the cases at the same place of Stephen Ward, Brian Epstein, Judy Garland, Mama Cass and many others. He could not remember a case 'in w-hiCh a missing Earl was a murder suspect but said "no one is interested in this thing except the press. They've built it up out of all proportiori." One, unsuccessful, way of clearing a pavement.

Bookworm

Antiquarian bookworms may have been surprised to find David Attenborough opening their book fare at the Europa hotel. He is better known in khaki shorts in the forests of New Guinea. But shortly after opening time the versatile Mr Attenborough, brother of a film producer and son of a distinguished Saxon historian, was in his half-moon spectacles and on his knees crawling behind counters as if looking for insects. "Travel and natural history" he found time to say to me.

Gasmen

The sixteent,h pair of gasmen since North Sea conversion two months ago have paid me a visit. One man released Vatican-like puffs of white smoke up the chimney while the other stood in the middle of the square to watch for results, when they left after half an hour all they had done was to stick a notice in red block capitals on my Ascot water-heater

Will Waspe

The Minister for the Arts, Mr Hugh Jenkins, really is taking an unconscionable time to go. As the months drag on, I find myself feeling actually sorry for him as he waits for the Wilsonian axe to fall — especially as he presides at press conferences (yet another last week) where he is inevitably asked about VAT or the RSC and has no answers to give. Sometimes he gives the impression that if only he had a personal fortune he would willingly dip into his own pocket and dole out the necessary to any and every supplicant, just for the blessed peace and relief of it.

Soft-sell

Last week Jenkins had the job of putting over the publication of a glossy booklet said to have cost £20,000 for the 50,000 copies, about artistic activity in the outlying regions. "A sprat to catch a mackerel," he explained — the 'mackerel' being the financial support of private firms for the arts. Nice aim, but it's a very soft-sell sprat, and I can't see 'big business' being bowled over and storming to saying "Important notice . . . vacate room while running bath water."

The thing is that before conversion I had three such .heaters in the house — all working perfectly. Now two don't work at all and the last one only does if lt hold down the bi-metal strip beside the pilot light with my toothbrush handle — which incidentally is getting shorter and shorter. If I 'vacate room' as ordered I have no hot water in the house.

This stark fact gets the usual reaction: "We're only sub-contractors and this is the only job we know about." I used to have eight gas fires in the house. Now only four work. One team of straight idiots disconnects the appliance hoping that another will come along and fix it up later — if they can.

Incompetence rewarded

The Post Office, everyone's favourite enemy, has been sending me up the pole again. I see that they now say, in a telephone brochure, that you have to pay extra if you go through the operator "for any reason" — even if you need his help to sort out one of those crossed wires you frequently get when trying to use the dialling system. For instance I know that for 2p at Waterloo Station I can ring Ascot and this gives me quite enough time to say what train I'm on. Yet when painful screeching noises forced me to resort to the operator the other day, 1 was asked "Have you got your 16p ready?" Why should we pay for their incompetence in money as well as time?

Qualified

I have tidings for Lord Longford. He has been nominated President of the Hot Stuff Club — a group of Fleet Street lefties led by Peter Paterson who wear a sort of squashed mustard tin on their ties. The reason is that every time the club has met at the Gay Hussar in Greek Street, Soho, they have found the well-known pornography expert eating at the next table. Next time, Lord Longford, why don't you try for a free meal?

Bicycles

Michael Bentine, the Old Etonian Peruvian Goon, forever wearing his old school tie, stopped me in Pont Street the other day to say that my bicycle reminded him of the antiquated machine once ridden by his late housemaster,

Mr Hope-Jones. Peregrine'

the rescue on the strength of posed pictures of children painting, dancers dancing and people looking, accompanied by the blandest of blurbs. A few tax concessions, now — that might have helped to ignite some private patronage interest. If you're talking about money, it's a good idea to talk money.

Time running out

Meanwhile yet another subsidised enterprise seems to be in for the Arts Council chop. After Phoenix Opera, the Actors' Company has had the word that the money supply is to be cut off. They have till the end of the year to work out a way of staggering on without a grant, which they have, in fact, little or no hope of doing. A pity, for they're a worthy lot and try hard, but in these hard times ...

Gimmick

Impresario Ray Cooney's idea of tying in seats for his show, There Goes the Bride, with dinner at the Ivy for an all-in fiver (well, actually, it's gone up to £5.50 and the dinner is no longer necessarily at the Ivy) has been doing so nicely that Sir Bernard Miles is doing the same thing at the Mermaid for £4.95 a head. Miles has a double advantage, because the Mermaid has its own restaurant. On the other hand, he has the disadvantage of having a terrible production of The Merry Wives of Windsor on his stage. But, then, it's not the good shows that need these gimmicks.