The Evening Hill Diaries: March 2023

November – December 2022 and beyond into the uncharted territory of 2023.

The origin of Covid-19. A theme I have returned to before. Under freedom of information requests, a series of e mails have surfaced between ‘top scientists’ (have you ever noticed that the Press always refer to ‘top scientists’ or ‘top surgeons’? They are never just scientists or surgeons.) in which they covertly agree to play down the laboratory origin theory. One of these is indeed a ‘top’ scientist – Sir Patrick Vallance.

Our days of storm and rain have been replaced by colder weather with mistiness and we ready ourselves for Christmas.

December 7

To Poole ‘Lighthouse’, as it calls itself, ‘Poole’s Centre for the Arts’ for the final Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra concert of the season before Christmas.

A very enjoyable send off, the final work being Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker Suite.

The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy brings back unforgettable memories of Cambridge.

1970. The Guildhall. Cambridge University Music Society’s final concert of the year, and indeed of my time at Cambridge. The University Orchestra was joined by a number of soloists, including Marisa Robles, the famous harpist.

At the very start of the ‘number’ mentioned above, David Willcocks, conductor, tottered onto the stage in full pink tutu carrying a wand with a pink star. Perfectly ‘on point’ he tiptoed over to the celesta and started to play. A final happy souvenir of Cambridge life.

Almost into Christmas, the football world cup has come and gone in Qatar. Although some of the football was stunning, particularly the final (Argentina beat France on penalties after a 3-3 finish), the obscene pouring of Qatari money into building stadia which are apparently already being pulled down, and their various other human rights abuses, were an abiding shadow over the tournament. The large payments made to ex-footballer commentators were also subject for comment. Gary Neville, in particular, was called out by Private Eye editor Ian Hislop, on the panel show ‘Have I Got News For You’. Joe Lycett, comedian, threatened to shred £50,000 of his own money if David Beckham did not donate his reported ten million pound fee for talking up Qatar (Beckham didn’t; Lycett shredded the money, though it was fake). An unpalatable thing, football, at least as far as money is concerned. Bobby Robson (ex-footballer, ex-manager) once said, ‘Twenty thousand pounds a week? I wouldn’t pay them twenty thousand pounds a year’. (It was a long time ago; the late Sir Bobby Robson died in 2009). A wry comment during the World Cup came as the Qataris pumped out high wattage pop music on their expensive sound systems. Much of it by George Michael, Elton John, and Queen. ‘Has nobody told them?’ was the comment. (Homosexuality is illegal in Qatar).

The cold snap brought the coldest day for 12 years.

January 3^rd, 2023

Topsy-turvy weather. Awful New Year’s Day. Brilliant January 2^nd with hundreds walking along the shore at Sandbanks and Branksome Chine, and heavy rain again today.

Bob Dylan has written a book! ‘The Philosophy of Modern Song’. Already in the New Year its price has come down from £30 to £17.50, which suggests it is not selling too well at the launch price. Generally speaking, it’s well reviewed though the omissions are curious – nothing about the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Joni Mitchell, Carol King, for instance. One reviewer wittily dubs Bob ‘The Hoarse Foreman of the Apocalypse’.

Journeyed to Burton Bradstock, to lunch in the Seaside Boarding House with friends from Somerset. Great company and an interesting menu compensated for a grey day with an implacable muddy brown sea below the cliffs leading towards Chesil Beach. The headland of Portland Bill remained hidden in the murk.

January 6^th

Travelled to Switzerland, ostensibly for a ski holiday, though for medical reasons and lack of insurance, neither of us actually skied. We walked. This made it the cheapest ski holiday ever. We were met by our friend who lives outside Zürich, and she treated us to the opera at the Zürich opera house. La Traviata. Fantastic. The opera house is much smaller than Covent Garden, and the feeling is very intimate. The soprano Nadezdha Pavlova was superb.

We walked gentle paths up over the Pflugstein hill, and then on Sunday we drove up to Lenzerheide.

During the week we walked remote paths, away from walkers and skiers, all marked as ‘winterwanderweg’. Toward the valley of Lain, above the Albula river, and on other days, up to the middle stations of the ski area, to favourite restaurants. On one day we took the bus to Tiefencastel then train (Rhätische Bahn) towards St Moritz, and changed in Pontresina to the famous Bernina Express, over the Bernina Pass and down to the little town of Poschiavo – almost on the Italian border. It looked like Italy, sounded like Italy, the food was like Italy, but the prices were Swiss. We had a superb lunch in the historic Hotel Albrici in the centre of the old town.

Zurich Opera House

Opera House Interior

Our friend's LPs of the opera - signed for her by Luciano Pavarotti

Zurich newspaper - 'Prince Harry's Revenge' (just after publication of 'Spare')

Winterwanderweg - away from skiers and snowboarders

No lifts required

Poschiavo

All the glitz in St Moritz

St Moritz - the Cresta Run statue by David Wynne

En route to the station in St Moritz

And back to Lenzerheide

All too soon we returned to England.

More cold snaps – we were babysitting grandchildren in the middle of West Sussex where the temperature fell to minus 8 overnight, but the weather was clear and cold.

A chilly evening in West Sussex

A milestone birthday on January 21^st – 75^th. I am sure that those of my age experience a slight sense of disbelief on reaching this point.

Again, too soon, it was time to visit hospital yet once more and have cataract surgery.

Still cold. Poole Harbour, January evening

February 2023

Reality will soon intrude, but it is often the trivia and the ridiculous that catches one’s eye. The Daily Telegraph must have made itself a laughing stock with a front page showing a bath with two people sitting comfortably inside it – one wearing a Duke of York mask, the other a Virginia Giuffre mask. This ‘mock-up’ by the Maxwell clan purports to show that this bath was too small for Ms Giuffre’s alleged sexual activity to have taken place. A K.C. writing in to the paper a few days later recalls defending a case on such grounds, to be gently told by the judge that in his long experience in court, no space was ‘too small’ for sexual activity to take place. Private Eye, the satirical scourge of corruption, ineptness, and hypocrisy, has had a field day with this one. Extraordinarily, the Telegraph followed up this laughable headline with another large photo of the actor Rupert Everett claiming that he knew who the woman was who ‘took Prince Harry’s virginity.’ He was probably wrong anyway – the unfortunate and likely person in question, now a married mother of two has come forward to silence the rumours.

But reality in this last week (6^th February) is a massive earthquake in Eastern Turkey and Syria, with many thousands dead. After the first shock of the tragedy and the occasional picture of a live survivor (including a newborn baby, all of whose family died), questions are inevitably being asked about the misuse of funds intended to be dedicated to amelioration of damage due to earthquakes. It is only 24 years since the last substantial earthquake in this highly susceptible region. The East Anatolian fault line marks the line of tectonic battle between the Anatolian plate and the Arabian plate.

Politics continues to baffle. Rishi Sunak (a name unpronounceable if you are called Biden) continues as Prime Minister. Nadine Dorries (dyed in the wool Johnson supporter) known to Private Eye as ‘Mad Nad’ is leaving politics. Liz Truss thinks she is returning to politics and gave an overly long statement of her beliefs and policies to the Daily Telegraph. Andrew Marr (experienced journalist and commentator calls her mini-manifesto ‘unhinged’). Nadim Zahawi, former chancellor has been caught out tax-dodging and has paid a fine to HMRC of several million pounds. He called his misfortune ‘Careless not Deliberate’, but the swingeing fine imposed implies that it is the other way round.

Talking of suspicious characters and shady money, the book club has read ‘The Great Gatsby’. (F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925). I was surprised by the high mark it achieved. But re-reading it after an interval of nearly 50 years I was struck by the quality of the writing. The excellent use of simile and metaphor is surely very original. Most critics agree that Fitzgerald’s style improved markedly from book to book, though by the time he wrote ‘Tender is the Night’ he must surely have been more sozzled than not. The autobiographical nature of the latter is clear. But ‘Gatsby’ also contains characters from life, and themes from Fitzgerald’s earlier life, including an unrequited love for a girl above him in social station and wealth. It has many famous quotes, and the well-known last lines, ‘So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.’ are engraved on his and Zelda’s memorial in an unremarkable cemetery in Rockville, Maryland. John Dos Passos remarked of the short stories that "everybody who has put pen to paper during the last twenty years has been daily plagued by the difficulty of deciding whether he's to do 'good' writing that will satisfy his conscience or 'cheap' writing that will satisfy his pocketbook.... A great deal of Fitzgerald's own life was made a hell by this sort of schizophrenia." (Source – Wikipedia). The Wikipedia entry on FSC reads like a PhD thesis with over 420 references and almost as many print sources. (It probably was. Ed.)

February 24^th, 2023. 1^st Anniversary of Russia’ invasion of Ukraine.

Dear Desultory Diary:

It is impossible to let this day past without some sort of diary entry. Unfortunately, as was pointed out by analysts this morning, neither side has the superior weaponry, at least at the moment, to claim victory. Ukraine has appealed for tanks, weapons, and aeroplanes, but the reinforcements are coming at a dribbling rate.

This day marked the end of my ‘Corona Diary’ as it was. Lamenting, locked down, and recording our lives, medicine, and virological science, seemed to become superfluous from February 24^th, 2022. That part of my diary is now encased in aspic, and over.

‘Borne back ceaselessly into the past.’ It seems that every step, every corner, every nuance of London, reminds one of the past. Walking to various medical appointments recently, I spy a well-polished plaque beside a Harley Street door indicating that a former friend and colleague at university now consults there. Two doors away from where I am now a patient, I occasionally performed cardiac catheterisations. Walking up to the Wellington Hospital, I remember being asked (while I was still a senior registrar) to go there to put in a temporary pacing wire. Missing out on lunch at King’s and rushing up to St John’s Wood to do this, I remember walking out of the X-ray suite to be greeted by the senior sister with a plate of smoked salmon sandwiches and a glass of fresh orange juice. An introduction to the elite world of London private medicine. All of the signs there are now in Arabic as well as English.

During a gap in medical consultations and scanning, I visit the Wallace Collection in Manchester Square. This fabulous collation of art has two of the most famous paintings in the world – ‘The Laughing Cavalier’ (Frans Hals) and ‘The Swing’ (Fragonard), but there is also an embarrassment of riches including Titian, Canaletto, Rubens, Rembrandt, and many more. Even a case of Sèvres porcelain made for Louis XVI is worth a King’s ransom.

A favourite - sea scene by Willem Van De Velde (younger)

Fragonard - 'The Swing'

Turning a corner, I come across Canaletto’s ‘Bacino di San Marco from San Giorgio Maggiore’, a print of which hung in my parents’ lounge for perhaps forty or more years.

The Laughing Cavalier has plenty of attention from the visitors to the gallery.

When working in the kitchens of the University Arms Hotel, in the summer of 1969, I was warily welcomed by the cooks and the apprentices. They could not understand why a ‘Grad’ would want to come and work there. One, whose name was Terry, was usually addressed as ‘Phoebe’, or ‘Pheebs’ on account of his extravagantly effeminate manner. Phoebe was a jack of all trades, but his preferred metier was pastry. He told me however that ‘Robbie’, the other pastry chef, a small, rather obsessional and fussy older man, who always seemed to be hurrying about the kitchen was a genius at icing and cake decoration. One of the cooks had recently got married, and Robbie had baked the cake.

‘You’ve seen the f…..g Laughing Cavalier, haven’t you?’ Asked Phoebe, rhetorically. I answered that I had indeed seen images of the picture in books.

‘All the f…..g lace and everything. Well, when Robbie had finished, it was as good as the f…..g Laughing Cavalier on top of that f…..g cake.’

I confessed that it must truly have been a wonderful cake.

March 3^rd

I had thought that my Corona diary had ended, but there are tailpieces. American select committees have come firmly down on the side of a laboratory leak from the Wuhan Virological Research Institute. Probably accidental.

The other tailpiece, which will run and run, is the release by a Telegraph journalist (Isabel Oakeshott) of 120,000 WhatsApp messages that included the former Health Secretary, Matt Hancock in their circulation. Ms Oakeshott, 48, is attractive and looks as though she could twist vulnerable men around her little finger. Indeed she has history in this area (having done the dirty on David Cameron in the past, after ‘helping’ with his autobiography, ‘Call Me Dave’. She also brought about the resignation of the UK Ambassador to the United States, Sir Kim Darroch, after she obtained and published confidential e mails in which he called Donald Trump ‘inept’, ‘insecure’ and ‘incompetent’). She has helped Hancock write his book about the pandemic, signed an NDA, but has released the data ‘in the public interest’. This begs the question that had we had a prompter inquiry into Covid-19 the release would not have been necessary because these messages would already be in the public domain. Other countries (e.g. Sweden and France) have already concluded their public inquiries. Isabel seems like a dangerous woman to know!

Nonetheless, the triteness of so many of the ‘conversations’ is striking. No evidence of true statesmanship is apparent in them. A distinguished businessman, speaking on a comment programme last night, observed that the correct way to deal with such grave matters was to meet together, in committee, to have the minutes recorded, and to come to decisions, whether wrong or right. He was appalled, and rightly so, by the conducting of such serious business in one line exchanges.

At least my Pandemic Diaries have been written without the help of Isabel Oakeshott.

March 7^th, 2023

Awaiting the next cold snap. Yet again, there is now more credence being given to the Covid-19 laboratory leak theory. It seems we are no longer afraid of the Chinese. They ignore us anyway.

March 13^th, 2023

I was going to write something about the ‘Gary Lineker Affair’. Oh no, I won’t. It is not worth my time and the column inches. Instead, a quotation from a review of a new book called ‘Georgian Arcadia’ by Roger White. The review is by Iona McLaren, who has gardens in her blood – she grew up at Bodnant in North Wales. The book traces the often weird architectural structures that began to populate the English garden of the nobility from the mid-18^th century, with elegant landscaping replacing the formal parterre style of the French. She says, ‘It is axiomatic that the only thing architects hate more than budgets is people.’ After many experiences with architects one can only say, ‘Amen to that’.

It’s time to conclude. These pictures are probably more eloquent than a few thousand more words…