DIARY
ALEXANDRA ARTLEY Earlier this week I arrived at the Players' Theatre, just off Villiers Street, with a large tin of Bolst's very hot Banga- lore curry powder and some coconut milk. It was the last-night theatre-party of the Victorian Society's architectural summer- school (prop: G. Stamp) and the Indian tins were intended for a charming Hunga- rian student called Janos who wanted to practise making curry when he rather reluctantly returned to Budapest. This year's summer-school (the best intake since 1977) fizzed along with 39 students hailing from as far afield as New Orleans and Prague. From the very start they had every sign of being a good architectural lot. One evening, when speeding back in the charabanc from a reception in Battersea, all heads swung as one to the windows and a great cry of joy went up as the sunset burst out behind Lots Road Power Station. By the last night at the Players' Theatre these very cosmopolitan students seemed even to appreciate the peculiar Cairo- ribald current of humour in British music- hall. During one brilliantly funny act called The Two Terpsichorean Tuaregs CI have congealed about my person an old Egyp- tian song-sheet') there was audience melt- down.
Here at Zeitgeist corner, Hungarian and Russian architectural people have been dropping in for supper all year ('Thank you — that was absolutely pleasant'). So far we have yet to meet a Hungarian who was not robustly charming. The Magyar Factor again asserted itself on Wednesday evening when the man fron the Museum of Applied Art in Budapest appeared to be stunned by my favourite Popular gramophone record of Schrammel- musik (bought in Leipzig almost a decade ago). As poor Janos said in disbelief, 'This is the music of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.' Suddenly, the chairs went back, the tables did what they liked and no one in the room (including a rather worrying Rumanian) could resist dancing. Unlike the rather stiff little string quartets which often play at English parties, a Schrammel quartet provides the most beguiling music — particularly in summer. The original Schrammel Quartet began in 1878 as a trio founded by the Viennese violinist brothers, Johann and Josef Schrammel and a bass guitarist called Anton Strohmayer. They collected old Viennese songs and played and composed dances and songs in the Heurigen (wine houses) in the countryside around Vienna. After they added a G clarinet in 1886, played by Georg Danzer, the quartet also became immensely popu- lar with other musicians such as Brahms, Johann Strauss and Hans Richter. In Au- stria the Schrammel tradition rather fit-
fully goes on and my record includes another Schrammel type — the Fiakerlied (a song supposedly sung by an Austrian cabby). In it, in the hot, dry air of a Central European night, a Fiaker rambles back to town and everyone is pleasantly tight including the lovers, the cabby and the horse. Next morning, after our im- promptu Schrammel evening, I had to go rather gently round the house picking poppadoms off the stairs and out of the bushes (where they lay like flying saucers) because yet another person had been sent by the estate agent to see the house. My advice to anyone seeing too much of estate agents in London this summer is to relax, have a glass of nice wine and Think Schrammel.
In a week now overtaken by tragedy, the most bizarre newspaper caption appeared in the Sunday Telegraph under a photo- graph of Angela Rumbold, the new 'Minis- ter for Women'. It read: 'Her ability to speak for the average British mother is the key to her success.' Really? During the past decade, the 'average British mother' and her family have had a pretty hard time Why are the studio backgrounds to television news bulletins always blue? One evening this week I checked again at random and, sure enough, on all the evening news programmes (Channel Four News, the BBC Nine O'Clock News, ITN News At Ten and BBC Newsnight) it was blue, blue, blue all night long. This has been going on for years. Sadly, because of political intolerance at the very top, every trivial thing in this country has become maddeningly politicised, but one hesitates to think that the choice of a studio back- drop. colour is some kind of conscious or --...% unconscious party-political signal. It is time
the powerful men of television called in the decorators. Like the Leeds stockbroker and Pre-Raphaelite art patron, Thomas Plint (who so infuriated William Rossetti), I would much enjoy to see a soonset floosh. from the likes of Angela Rumbold and a government which has reduced child be- nefit, run down state nursery education, cut family planning clinics, abandoned the nutritional standard in school meals and curtailed statutory rights to maternity leave. The decimation these and other policies (particularly housing) have caused among very poor families has been shame- ful. With the honourable exceptions of Ann Winterton, Maureen Hicks and Elaine Kellet-Bowman, who have consis- tently voted in support of child benefit, there is not one woman Conservative MP, from the Prime Minister downwards, who. can now open her mouth on the subject of The Family without incurring hilarity and derision.
Training small children to ignore big dogs and not to exude fear seems to be the fate of inner-city mothers trying to walk in safety throught the baking streets to school-holiday playgrounds. The nicer the person the smaller the dog, is still one of the rules of urban life, but streets in central ' London are now infested with seedy brutes leading (or often just shepherding) very big and unruly dogs indeed. The latest free- lance rottweiler club (unregistered with the Kennel Club) is now situated within a few streets of The Spectator. This must be the only country in Europe in which a dog worrying sheep can be shot on the spot, but the life of a dog which has already eaten the face off a child is pleaded for in the courts at public expense. When he be- comes the new Archbishop of Canterbury, one popular move Dr George Carey could make is to arrange an annual dogs' auto da fe in Hyde Park with the guarantee of 30 feet of warm, undulating ash from the remains of 80,000 canine stiffies.
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