Diary
T spent last Saturday at an all-day pop 1 festival at the Wembley Stadium in what can only be described as terminal discom- fort. For 11 hours a crowd of 70,000 fans were trapped (there was no readmittance) in a football ground ankle-deep in beer cans and abandoned wine boxes. No food was available other than microwaved hot dogs and vegetarian 'Cornish' pasties without meat in the filling. Queues for the few lavatories were so long that they inspired mathematical problems: 'If all the fans in Wembley Stadium queued four abreast for a single urinal, how many litre cans of lager could they consume before reaching the front?' As the temperature rose, many peo- ple stripped off their tee-shirts exposing tat- toos, and the pong from their plimsolls formed a disturbing smog above the stadium. Two 30-year-old women started a vicious fist-fight over a boyfriend and had to be prised apart by stewards. Not even in the poorest districts of Erzurum or Khar- toum have I seen so many ugly people in one place. At half past seven, however, when Elton John began his set, the au- dience was transformed. Every single per- son in the stadium was word-perfect on his songs, which they mouth beatifically. This was a sobering spectacle. I have always found the lyrics of Elton John's ballads od- dly moving, and fancied myself to have a special insight into their poetry. Now I discover they are as widely accessible as The Two Ronnies and The Price Is Right; both television programmes, as it happens, that I also rather enjoy.
The latest instalment of the Listener's advertising campaign is so extraor- dinary that I can only assume it is an elaborate practical joke. A few months ago the editors of half a dozen national newspapers, including the Daily Telegraph, the Observer and the Guardian, were pic- tured brandishing copies of the Listener and endorsing it in the most extravagant terms. In the follow-up advertisement, however, which appears in this week's Radio Times, we see a tableau of five women perched uneasily on a bamboo sofa and surrounded by pot plants. Some of them are holding their copy of the Listener upside down; others have folded it in half to resemble a 'clutch bag'. These, it emerges, are the editors of top women's magazines and they all have pertinent com- ments to make about the Listener. 'It's not the magazine for people who think "erudite" is glue!' opines Sally O'Sullivan, the redheaded editor of Options. 'It's not a magazine you have an affair with. It's the kind you marry,' says Laurie Purden, editor of Woman's Journal. It is hard to imagine that prospective readers of the Listener, that fine and sober periodical, are liable to be tempted into taking out a subscription by testimonials of this nature. On the evidence of the photograph, I am willing to bet that the five editors on the sofa don't see the Listener more than a dozen times a year between them.
Not the least diverting thing about the Michael Telling 'headless corpse' trial was the journalistic preface that heralded him each time he was mentioned: 'Prince Charles's polo-playing chum millionaire meat-packer Lord Vestey's second cousin Michael Telling said in court yesterday . .
In a mere 12 words Telling is transferred from pathetic schizophrenic living in High Wycombe into a Gatsbyesque international jet-setter, rich, powerful and close to the throne. The brilliance of this gossip-column device lies in the way that none of the tenuous details relate; they appear to be connected but upon examination are seen to be wholly inconsequential. A cursory glance at Michael Telling's photograph is enough to establish that he had never played polo, or was remotely known to the Prince of Wales. Stranger still is the gratuitous fact about Michael Telling's se- cond cousin Lord Vestey being a 'meat packer': a bizarre detail to choose as in- dicative of Telling's supposed high-life. In- venting similar gossip-column non sequiturs for hypothetical situations is a good party game. Select someone in the room and con- nect him with the great and the good in the minimum number of words. 'School friend of (for contempories of royality, even when they never met) and 'Fellow club member' are useful links. A topical example of the game might be 'Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's admirer motorway food mogul Lord Forte's Watford Gap assistant griddle chef Joe Egg was yester- day's Times Portfolio winner .
Acurious news item surfaced on page 10 or 11 of most tabloid papers last week, which must have baffled casual readers. Four terse photographs announced that the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has developed a new breed of domestic animal, the yaez, the meat of which was reported to taste better than lamb and will shortly be marketed in Britain. 'A new Sun- day roast may soon be gracing the nation's dinner plates,' ran this jaunty item with the born-again whiff of a half-digested press release. 'Yaez meat tastes like a cross bet- ween a female goat and a male ibex.' I have no idea how many Daily Mail readers regularly eat ibex. It is not available at most butchers, nor can ibex be hunted without special licence in the Sudan, or even in Switzerland where it is known as the stein- bock or bouquetin. Despite the optimistic preview, I very much doubt we will hear anything more of yaez chops or escalopes.
Three times in recent weeks I have heard of people booking more than one restaurant table to ensure privacy. The first was Peter Cameron-Webb, the disgraced Lloyd's underwriter, who routinely reserv- ed a corner table in the Berkeley Hotel din- ing room plus the two adjacent tables to deter eavesdroppers. Last week a Liverpool councillor was reported to reserve more than one table at the Britannia Adelphi Hotel. Frankly I find it taxing enough to reserve a single table, and am unsure about the etiquette of booking several empty ones. Do you pay a statutory privacy fee, or is the bill computed on the average cost per head multiplied by the number of chairs? Or do you barter with the head waiter, claiming that the 'dead' table would other- wise have been engaged by parsimonious melon and omelette eaters? Or do you simply ring the restaurant to reserve a par- ticular table, and then ring back several times, in a variety of funny voices, to book the surrounding ones? This is a variation on the despicable technique used by Scottish friends who regularly take the Royal Highlander from Euston to Inverness. Travelling second class, but preferring to have the double sleeper to themselves, they reserve both bunks at the same time under different surnames. When the other person fails to turn up they deny all knowledge of him. This enables them to store their lug- gage on the spare bunk, undress in privacy and co-opt an extra pillow, without paying a first-class fare.
Last week I eulogised in this space about the Country Life engagements fron- tispiece, and how the girls personified the virtues of chastity and wholesomeness. Now I discover that I am not their only ad- mirer. Lunching in Manchester this week I was told of a mysterious Indian, possibly a doctor, who frequently pesters the girls with obscene phone calls. Having discovered their number from Directory Enquiries through the home address printed beneath the photograph, he either com- mends himself as a better lover than the groom, or breathes heavily in the time- honoured manner.
Nicholas Coleridge
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