Clubman
Sir: I cannot have been the only reader to enjoy Jennifer sorry Peregrine Worsthorne's Notebook in your issue of 29 October with its comforting reassurance that in Belgravia, as in Georgetown and elsewhere, he is still cruising the cocktail circuit, rather blimpishly recalling his teenage patriotic response to wartime Churchillian calls never to surrender. One must certainly concede the justice of his complaints about the atrociously inept casting of Anna and Vronsky ('paleish Oicks' in Dobsonese) in the Anna Karenina of the BBC, a corporation where from its continual appearances on both its channels' screens one would have supposed him capable of having some influence in these matters. He might have proposed for Vronsky either the Duke of Norfolk's son-in-law or the Duke of Wellington's nephew, both available and presentable jeunes premiers, though he should not have forgotten that Anna was once played, with a genius and distinction sufficient to satisfy even the snootiest of Belgian haute bourgeoisie, by a Stockholm shopgirl called Greta Gustayson, alias Garbo.
One rather wonders what they thought at the Garrick or the Beefsteak of Mr Worsthorne's admission that he regards his fellow members as so much column-fodder for the late Dick Crossman's favourite fellow political journalist and companion at the Hartwell Stammtisch. Puzzling too was his failure to identify the sex of either of the two persons who accosted him in 'broad' daylight "twixt Park Lane and Fleet Street. Some earlybird Bunny (one not going to France perhaps) recognising Stowe's selfstyled `Guineapig Gent'? Or could it have been George Melly himself, flown with lunchtime insolence and wine, and anxious to consummate at last that Stoic seduction about which, in the world of the public school, his alleged victim had so cockadoodledoodly, and it seems quite prematurely, ejaculated?
Alastair Forbes Firle near Lewes
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