If you know a finer clubhouse for chess aficionados, tell me. This is the Nuovo Circolo Degli Scacchi in Rome. It’s almost worth playing chess to belong but I can pop in as a reciprocal member and have done so.
John Colville’s Downing Street Diaries are not what they seem He could be taken to task under the Trade Descriptions Act (1968) as on the first page he “was living in luxury, at least by war-time standards, and basking in the Prime Minister’s favour.”
I have just bought an inexpensive, second-hand, dog-eared paperback published in 1987 in which are appended the author’s biographical notes on some of the people mentioned. Can you identify even one of them?
The walk upstream to Richmond is back on Bertie’s and my agenda. Yesterday we completed it in two hours, thirty-five minutes; creditable considering Bertie had to play with a canine chum, board a houseboat (Avanti), and join a picnic.
In 1956 Patrick Nairne was “head of the Middle Eastern and international law section of what was, rather quaintly, known as Military Branch of the Admiralty secretariat“. He found himself “though relatively junior, in a front-line administrative post during the Suez affair”.
When Margaret Thatcher, as she then was, made Irwin Bellow a Life Peer in 1979 he wanted, unsurprisingly, to be known as Lord Bellow. This was not allowed by the College of Arms which, I suppose, means Garter as he might be mistaken for Lord Bellew.
Who was Sir James Cassels? He was born in 1877, the only son of an assistant clerk at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court. James learned shorthand at school but was destined for greater things than life as a clerk.
Van Gogh’s peasants, he painted them in 1885, are startlingly unattractive. His subjects were inspired by The Blessing before Supper by Charles de Groux; a more comely assemblage.
Yesterday Bertie and I walked up the towpath to Richmond for the first time in over three months. During lockdown there had been many too many cyclists, joggers and walkers to use the towpath safely but now it’s back to pre-virus normal and Bertie was off the lead most of the time.
You can judge this book by its cover; the cover is orange, the endpapers green. Brian Desmond Hurst was born a Protestant in Belfast but converted to Catholicism so an apt reflection of his life.