The Oldie November 2022

Cosmo Landesman (p25) founded the Modern Review in 1991 with his thenwife, Julie Burehill, and Toby Young. He writes about his son’s suicide and his book Jack and Me: How NOT To Live After Loss. Robert Bathurst (p57) was David in five series of Cold Feet and Sergeant Wilson in Dad’s Army: The Lost Episodes. He starred in Jeffrey Bernard Is Unwell. He was in Love, Loss & Chianti this summer. Daisy Dunn (p59) is author of Not Far from Brideshead: Oxford between the Wars. She also wrote Catullus’s Bedspread, In the Shadow of Vesuvius and the Ladybird Guide to Homer. Rick Stroud (p88) is author of Kidnap in Crete: the True Story of the Abduction of a Nazi General. He wrote Lonely Courage about the women of SOE. He’s won an Emmy…

* The 50th anniversary of Are You Being Served? was rightfully celebrated by Roger Lewis in our May issue. Sadly, it’s not just the hallowed premises of Grace Brothers department store that are no more. In a new book, London’s Lost Department Stores: A Vanished World of Dazzle and Dreams, Tessa Boase celebrates their heyday. Boase writes, ‘Today, we have little idea of the sheer dazzle of these “Halls of Temptation” during the golden age of shopping their theatrical spectacle, assault on the senses, architectural élan. From the Art Deco of Derry & Toms, with its Moorish roof garden, to the startling Moderne lines of Holdrons of Peckham Rye, department stores led the way in fashion and design.’ Deny & Toms, on Kensington High Street, began life as Toms family grocery in 1826.…

Shoppers upset at news of the Co-op cat’s death Aberdeen Press Journal Bumps in short road Times Gym at Bourton Leisure Centre closes for refurbishment Cotswold Journal £15 for published contributions NEXT ISSUE The December issue is on sale on 16th November 2022. GET THE OLDIE APP Go to App Store or Google Play Store. Search for Oldie Magazine and then pay for app. OLDIE BOOKS The Very Best of The Oldie Cartoons, The Oldie Annual 2023 and other Oldie books are available at: www.theoldie.co.uk/readers-corner/shop Free p&p. OLDIE NEWSLETTER Go to the Oldie website; put your email address in the red SIGN UP box. HOLIDAY WITH THE OLDIE Go to www.theoldie.co.uk/courses-tours…

Our muchloved deputy editor and patron saint of The Oldie, Jeremy Lewis, died in 2017, aged 75. In his memory, we run the Jeremy Lewis Prize, worth £500. It rewards the sort of writing that emulates Jeremy’s wit and lightness of touch in his books and journalism. What to write about In 400 words, recount a memory (similar to our Memory Lane column, on page 54 of this issue). Please begin by saying when the events you describe took place. How to send your entry Simply email your entry to editorial@theoldie.co.uk by 13th November 2022. Please mark it JEREMY LEWIS PRIZE.…

What for you were the most moving moments during the coverage of the Queen’s funeral? For me it was, probably, the first sight of her coffin being borne on the shoulders of those fine young soldiers - or possibly her groom, Terry Pendry, on the Long Walk at Windsor, standing, head bowed, with the Queen’s pony, Emma, as the royal hearse drove Her Majesty home for the last time. Because I was part of the BBC team covering it all, every day over the ten days between her death and the funeral, I found myself in London walking from Green Park tube station across the park to the Victoria Monument outside Buckingham Palace where the BBC (alongside scores of other broadcasters from across the world) had set up their makeshift studios. Meeting the…

Although my mother had a successful career as a fashion journalist, she missed out on not one but two other vocations. Those with ungodly staying power will find the second outlined at the end, but the first career for which nature ideally equipped her was that of interrogator. She could break the hardest Lubyanka inmate with nothing more in her arsenal of torment than verbal relentlessness. ‘Have you booked it yet?’ she asked a couple of months ago, the ‘it’ being one of those enticements with which the daytime television audience is unceasingly bombarded. Joining funeral insurance, recliner chairs and pulsating devices on which Ian Botham places his feet is a commercial for a viral vaccine. ‘Have you booked it?’ she reiterated after the first enquiry was met with sullen silence. ‘Inexplicably,’ I replied, ‘what…