Less Is Moore

 One of the pleasures of my boyhood was going round to my grandmother's flat to watch TV (we didn't have a set at home at the time). On Saturday afternoons my brother and I would join her to watch the wrestling (Kent Walton ringside), and on weekend evenings there would be such delights as Danger Man, starring the very cool Patrick McGoohan, and The Saint, based on Leslie Charteris's stories, and starring Roger Moore. As it happens, today is Roger Moore's 99th birthday, though he isn't around to celebrate it (he died just short of 90). 
   Back in the early days of this long-lived blog, I included Roger Moore in a series called Cravat Heroes, part of my doomed campaign to encourage the wearing of the deeply unfashionable cravat. Here's some of what I wrote then...

'Roger Moore began by modelling knitwear, and continued to model a variety of formal and leisure wear for many decades, under the guise of an acting career (a career that connoisseurs agree peaked with his Lord Brett Sinclair in The Persuaders, opposite Tony Curtis). In matters of the dramatic art, Moore was a rigorous minimalist and restricted his efforts to the raising and lowering of one eyebrow, clearly believing that 'less is more'. Alas, in his case, less was indeed less – or rather, less was (hem hem) Moore. Strangely, Moore – a natural cravat man if ever there was one – has not pulled his weight in this crucial field of neckwear, usually preferring the naked neck look with an open shirt (long past the point at which this ceased to be advisable on aesthetic grounds). However, it has always seemed as if a kind of Platonic cravat was somehow there, even in its physical absence, rather as an ectoplasmic moustache has always hovered over John Major's upper lip. I think, despite everything (including the questionable pairing of a cravat with a frilly shirt), Roger Moore is worthy of inclusion in the Cravat Heroes pantheon...'

   Moore is sometimes credited with the invention of the Magnum – not the gun but the choc ice on a stick, a confection which has brought much pleasure to many, myself included. Alas, the facts don't quite support the legend...

'After Sir Roger's death, a journalist friend recalled that he had told her how, in an interview in the Sixties, he once said that, if he could have one wish and meet one person, he would like to meet 'Mr Wall's' and ask him why they didn't make a choc ice on a stick. 'I didn't know at the time,' recalled Moore ruefully, 'but other people like Claire Bloom were being asked the same question and they wanted to meet Gandhi or Jesus.' But apparently 'Mr Wall's' was delighted with Moore's answer and sent him some kind of prototype Magnum, but as it was in the form of a cake it was clearly a very long way from the finished product, which indeed didn't appear until the Nineties.
  Happily Sir Roger lived long enough to enjoy many a Magnum (despite being diabetic). His favourite was the Black Espresso, of which he permitted himself two a week. He claimed to be able to make one last a full half hour, which is impressive. The Black Espresso is my favourite too, but I rarely come across it these days, amid all the fancy new flavours.
If I had one request to make of 'Mr Wall's', it would be to find a way to stop the chocolate falling off the ice cream as you bite into your Magnum.'

Things have not improved: the Magnum still sheds chocolate – and the Black Espresso seems to have disappeared altogether. Perhaps 'Mr Wall's' could bring out a limited edition to celebrate the Roger Moore centenary next year.

The Best of Times

 I was walking along Market Street (pedestrianised) this morning when a man, walking briskly in the opposite direction, drew level with me and, as he passed, turned his head and, looking me firmly in the eye and grinning cheerily, exclaimed: 'Growing up in the Fifties and Sixties, eh? The best of times, weren't they, the best?' Slightly taken aback, I could but concur. 'They certainly were,' I declared. 'We were the lucky generation.' He had nothing to add, and was already on his merry way.
  It was a cheering encounter – the kind of thing that happens quite often in Lichfield – and I genuinely believe that my (and his) generation were indeed very lucky: we lived in times of peace, full employment, surefire pensions and ever rising prosperity, while many things improved dramatically in our lifetimes – not least the relative cheapness and ease of travel, and the range and quality of food and drink available to us. Of course, a lot got worse as well, but let's not get into that. I think it is probably fair to say we were in many ways a lucky generation, perhaps the luckiest. I don't see things running so easily for the next generation, or the next...
  A short while later, I was getting a duplicate front-door key cut. While I waited in the shop, I noticed a photo of the manager with a few lines underneath in which he tells us about himself. His interests, I learned, include cycling, running, video games – and, er, making bespoke Viking axes. Then I noticed that he was wearing a tie pin in the shape of a Viking battle axe. Funny old world. 
    

Not the End of the World

 Until I started reading (mostly for research, but I'm enjoying it) Apocalypse: A History of the End of Time by John Michael Greer, I had forgotten that the world was supposed to end in a mighty cosmic collision on the 21st of December, 2012. This could apparently be inferred from the ever reliable Mayan calendar (or one reading of one version thereof – these matters are never simple), and the event was confidently expected by various New Age crackpots, who descended in their thousands on the blameless village of Bugarach in the Aude department of France, much to the annoyance of the locals. The New Agers believed that the nearby peak, the Pic du Bugarach, contained a kind of UFO hangar, from which, at the appointed time, aliens would emerge in their spaceships and rescue all bystanders, even as the world fell into ruin around them.
 By the time the apocalyptic hour arrived, the gendarmerie had blocked access to the peak, leaving only a handful of believers, a small army of international journalists and a few pranksters in tinfoil hats in attendance. Of course nothing happened, but, had the world ended on time, the sole survivors would have been journalists, New Age nutjobs and disgruntled French villagers – who would have been even more disgruntled at being whisked off in an alien spacecraft. Not the ideal cross-section of humanity. 

Bayeux Brouhaha

 I must admit to being rather mystified by all the brouhaha attending the display of the on-loan Bayeux Tapestry at the British Museum. Surely if anyone was that interested they had only to hop over the Channel and take a look at it in situ in Bayeux. I was there some years ago, dutifully inspected it, and was frankly underwhelmed. Of course it has great historical importance and it's a remarkable survival, but as a work of art/craft it really isn't that great – certainly not when compared with the glorious embroidered work from the 12th to 15th century known as Opus Anglicanum. Seeing the exhibition devoted to this work at the V&A ten years ago was a vastly more rewarding and aesthetically enjoyable experience than walking the length of the dreary Bayeux Tapestry. I wrote about it here –

https://nigeness.blogspot.com/2016/10/english-beauty.html

And while we're on the subject of the Bayeux Tapestry, I wonder if the vexed question of how many penises it depicts has finally been settled. I do hope so...

https://nigeness.blogspot.com/2025/04/none-of-them-has-yellow-blob-at-end.html

The Departure of the Myths

 Here is another poem by Dick Davis – and why not? He's one of the best (and still living). This one is a rare excursion into something very like free verse, and I think it works beautifully. 

The Departure of the Myths

Now that the series of
Tottering bedizened
Edifices goes toppling
And tinkling into
The distance, surrounded
By singers and saltimbanques,
By outriders who curvet
Their horses and flourish
Bright, fabulous weapons –
We cannot deny that 
The silence is (as
They grinningly warned us
It would be) unnerving. 

But almost immediately
It's broken; a child
Is wailing somewhere – 
And look, there it is
Grubby and rubbing its eyes,
About five years old,
Of indeterminate 
Sex, left behind by
The glamorous, vanishing
Self-absorbed caravan that
Now, as we watch, grows small
In the sunset.
                      Suddenly
We see how ridiculously
Heedlessly cruel
That gross splendour had become –
How could it have touched us?
We hate it and rush
To console the distraught
Child who stubbornly
Evades our caresses and
Bawls for its mother. 


[Saltimbanques are travelling entertainers, jugglers, dancers and the like]

Evensong

 A melancholy anniversary today – one that seems to get worse each year as it triggers ever more naked displays of Jew-hate. However – a big, welcome 'However' – today is also the centenary of the first radio broadcast of Choral Evensong, the world's longest-running outdoor broadcast. Radio 3 is marking the occasion with a live broadcast from Westminster Abbey – where the first Choral Evensong was recorded back in 1926 – at 3 this afternoon. 
   Choral Evensong is one of the great British institutions, a product of the unique tradition of choral singing and education in our cathedrals and collegiate churches that is one of the glories of our national culture. Indeed, English Evensong has been submitted to the UK Living Heritage Inventory, with a view to getting UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage Listing. Whether it gets that or not, let's hope it – and Radio 3's weekly broadcast – last another hundred years. 
   Here's a taste of that Intangible Cultural Heritage – the Magnificat from the service known as Stanford in A, sung by the choir of St John's College, Cambridge –

Another

 Yesterday Mrs N and I attended another talk (it was 'Enlighten' weekend in Lichfield, a series of events aimed at making us once again a 'city of philosophers'). The talk was by biographer and self-confessed journalist Anne Sebba, and the subject was her recent book, The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz. Unfortunately I hadn't noticed that, at some time after the programme for the weekend was printed, the time for this talk had been brought forward by half an hour, so we missed the first half. However, to judge by the second half, it was an excellent, if harrowing, talk, telling an extraordinary story, and telling it well. Towards the end, the chair (Nick Higham) invited questions from the floor. The first few were good, thoughtful questions – but then came one more, one that wasn't really a question at all. A youngish woman in the front row, who seemed to be in some mild emotional distress, wished to display her tender moral sensibility by 'wondering' if the Jews, having suffered the Holocaust, were now inflicting the same thing on the inhabitants of Gaza. Anne Sebba managed to stay cool and give an emollient diplomatic answer. Of course the last thing she wanted was to get drawn into contemporary Middle Eastern politics; she was there to talk about The Women's Orchestra of Auschwitz – the clue's in the title – but this, apparently, was of little interest to the woman in the front row, who had an agenda and a point (an irrelevant and historically illiterate point) to make, and that was far more important. It was a sad end to the occasion, and left a nasty taste in the mouth, especially on a day when the Green Party, in its wisdom, has declared that 'Zionism is racism', thereby positioning itself as the most antisemitic party since the National Front. Enough.