DIARY
DEBORAH DEVONSHIRE The only thing I minded about Mr Yeo's carry-on was the photograph of him barging out of a restaurant lengths in front of his mistress. The first politician with such frightful manners was Mr Wilson, who was always getting in and out of aeroplanes first, with poor Mary shambling along behind. I wish someone would tell them not to do it.
Buying water in bottles to drink at home must be one of the oddest crazes of the last few years. All right, I know London water tastes horrible and Nanny would say don't touch it, darling, you don't know where it's been (sometimes they tell us where it's been, which proves Nanny to be right), but most water tastes the same as the bottled kind and is perfectly good just as it comes out of the tap. Beautiful pic- tures on the labels and names which con- jure up moorland streams, most likely to be stuffed with liver fluke, appeal to the gullible shoppers. Once bought, the heavy bottles have to be lugged back to the car as there is not much pleasure in a guilty gulp of water in the shop. The choice seems endless. Bottles of all shapes and sizes and even colours (the blue one is very pretty) fill the shelves of grocers' shops already given over to as much dog, cat and bird food as that for humans. I suppose people will soon be buying water for pets or they will be accused of discriminating against them. Think of the number of lorries carry- ing this extraordinary cargo all over the country, getting in the way of things that matter, like you and me going for a spin. But the astonishing thing is the price. Please note that milk costs 43p a litre (it averages 23p to the farmer, by the way), petrol is a little over 50p a litre, and still water, would you believe it, costs up to 79p for the same quantity. As a shopkeeper, I must think up some other pointless com- modities with which to fuddle the good old public.
We have heard a lot lately about two men sharing a bed in a French hotel and the usual speculation as to what may have happened in it. You only have to go a little way back in history to discover that trav- ellers often had to share a bed whether they chose to or not. In the 1750s, Henry Cavendish, the famous scientist, and his brother Frederick journeyed to Paris together. When they arrived in Calais they stopped at an inn and had to sleep in a room in which someone was already in bed. It was a corpse laid out for burial. The Cavendish family were famed for silence (until a timely injection of Cecil blood in the last generation set them talking more
than most). Lord Brougham wrote of Henry, 'He probably uttered fewer words in the course of his life than any man who lived to fourscore years and ten, not except- ing the monks of la Trappe.' Nothing was said by the laconic pair till they were well on the road next morning. Eventually Fred- erick said, 'Brother, did you see?"Yes, I did, Brother,' Henry answered. Just think what would happen now. First the hotel manager would be sent for and given a dressing-down, as he often is by spoilt trav- ellers who don't like finding a dead person in their room. Then the rich headlines would follow: 'Duke's nephews practise necrophilia in French hotel.' And there is the question of incest . . .
e live in a National Park, and very pleasant it is too. Planning restrictions are, rightly, fairly rigid and the planners' delib- erations over relatively simple jobs like farm buildings are slow. This is as it should be and any small irritation is far out- weighed by the benefits. Debate over the age-old local industry of quarrying is on at the moment. The winning of minerals from under the ground has gone on in these parts from time immemorial, from the lead mines of yesteryear to the valuable and ver- satile barytes, fluorspar and stone quarries of today. The grey and green landscape of the lonely limestone High Peak uplands is netted by dry-stone walls making tiny enclosures of crazy shapes. Every so often there are sudden deep clefts in the rocky soil which form the Derbyshire Dales, admired and enjoyed by all who know them. The scenery is more dramatic where the man-made cliffs of the huge quarries outdo the natural ones and just as beautiful in its own stark way. The rules to do with reinstating worked-out quarries are strict, and nature sees to it that they soon begin to look like their natural rocky neighbours as the native flora spreads itself to clothe the stone faces. Quarrying is now described by the familiar single-issue brigade of protesters as 'a threat to the National Park'. Last week a television documentary hired a comedian to tell us it ought to be stopped. He wasn't at all funny and, any- way, it is a serious subject. He said, 'Allow- ing more quarrying in the Peak Park is like grinding up York Minster for motorway hardcore.' I wonder what material he thinks York Minster is built of and where it came from. No quarry, no Minster. He went on, 'The Peak District is a far cry from the paradise envisaged by the people who set up the parks.' I suppose he thinks that putting people out of work makes a par- adise. Now schoolchildren are being indoc- trinated against the industry. A friend of mine, who is a county councillor in another part of the country, received letters from a class of ten-year-olds with an identical mes- sage obviously dictated by their teacher. They complained of birds and bees being frightened away by work in a local quarry. My friend wrote back, 'Are you driven to school along a road? Do you live in a house? Has it occurred to you that roads and houses are made of stone and that stone comes out of quarries?' If the televi- sion comedian and the teacher have their way we shall soon be importing aggregate for roads and stone for building in spite of sitting on millions of tons of the stuff. Can you imagine anything madder?
The complainers complain about every- thing. They don't like foxhounds, crowing cockerels or quarrying, and now they say car-boot sales must be stopped. I suppose we are to be denied the chance of buying a Constable in a muddy field and taking it to the Antiques Roadshow so Henry Wyndham can tell us we have bought a fortune for £2. Oh dear. Long live banned work and play.
Previous page
