Do you have larch or Scots pine near you? Do you have a bag of purposeless candle-ends to dispose of? And the usual heap of empty egg boxes? Here are the instructions for making firelighters. Collect a basketful of egg-sized pine-cones, placing one in each of the eggbox pouches. Melt the wax in a pan you never want to use again. Fill each pouch. With sturdy kitchen scissors or a small saw, cut the egg boxes into individual pouches. Voilà, you have a regiment of fierce little firelighters. You have little idea what fun I had making 130 of these last week.
Notes from Dad
The other highlight was different: a Brahms piano concerto and symphony at St John’s Smith Square, in London. The Outcry Ensemble were in great form, the huge orchestra filling the old church with beautiful noise. Brahms reminds me of a caged bear, throwing himself furiously at his cage’s bars: the boundaries of 19th-century conservative classical tradition. But, more than that, he makes me think of my late father, who loved his music. As a youth it wasn’t my kind of thing, but I so admired Dad that I tried and tried to like it. And now I do, very much, but hearing it still through the prism of my father. If Dad hadn’t been with me in St John’s, it wouldn’t have been the same.
Once bitten
Without humility I claim to have originated the hypothesis that nobody associates themselves for long with Boris Johnson and survives with their lives unmangled. His is the vampire’s kiss. Running through the names — Cameron, May, poor Lord Brownlow, Lord Geidt, Lulu Lytle, Richard Sharp, a range of wives and lovers whom chivalry forbids me to name . . . even as I write I hear the faint cries of the wounded. Rishi Sunak only just got out alive. But there’s one exception, much in the news this week as we study Matt Hancock’s WhatsApp contacts. Simon Case lives on. Oh, wait. Or does he? Look for those two little bite-marks on the cabinet secretary’s neck.
Code red
A month ago I wrote about my great-grandfather’s suicide: a railway signalman demoted because he was colour-blind. In my post this week came a rather touching letter from an 83-year-old correspondent, describing how red-green blindness has affected him: “I was unable to do titrations in chemistry, I couldn’t join the forces, or be an electrician or a colour-printer, [or join] the railways or navigation.” He even has to be careful with banknotes, because the colours in £20 and £5 notes “look the same”. Why, he asks, did we ever choose red and green for traffic lights? An interesting question — why has red for so long been the colour for danger, green for safety? Come to think of it, why not red and blue, or purple and yellow, for traffic lights? I’ve never thought of the colour-blind as seriously afflicted, but maybe that’s just because they don’t make a fuss about it?
A righteous fuss
Why, Sue? Keir, why? When two political figures collude in a plan that — to all outside observers — obviously damages both, we should look for explanations not in politics but in psychoanalysis. With Gray it is rage: the red mist that came down when Downing Street strangled her inquiry. With Starmer it is self-righteousness: the conviction that his personal honour is beyond question. He should watch out. As Cromwell discovered, the English have only a certain amount of time for roundheads. After a while, an air of holier-than-thou begins to irritate and invite evidence to the contrary. He has just provided it.
Fever warning
We’re off for a fortnight in Argentinian and Chilean Patagonia and I can’t wait. I’m finishing this notebook on a 16-hour flight to Buenos Aires. Apparently Argentinian inflation is about 100 per cent, and the black market for dollars has become so much part of life that it’s now known as the blue market. Laugh not, fellow Brits. That’s what happens when the voters’ sense of entitlement outruns politicians’ ability to satisfy it other than by borrowing or printing money. Argentina may have a raging fever but last year we British sneezed.
