Nevin's Funny Old Things: A marvellous miscellany of past wit, wisdom, and whimsical curiosities
- Charles Nevin
- Apr 2
- 20 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
April 16
I was reminded, when I strayed into the other St Peter’s, his vast cathedral in Bologna, that reverence has not always been quite so reverent.
There was a mass confirmation ceremony about to begin, the church was full of children, the noise and excitement absolutely tremendous. A man dressed as John the Baptist was ratcheting it further with a warm-up act for the presiding archbishop which included Mexican waves up and down the mighty nave.
Our forebears would have been at home. There was a worldly recognition that even the attractions of eternity require certain accommodations and enticements.
As we know, Christian churches are very often on the sites of earlier beliefs; and many argue that there are any number of nods to this, from gargoyles to the Green Men peering though their carved foliage.
As we also know, there’s nothing quite like religion for disputation. Because the Green Man was only so christened (sic) in the 1930s, there’s an academic distrust of these clearly pagan symbols in our churches. And fierce debate about whether they are a warning to the faithful, charms to ward off evil spirits, or early examples of an enlightened inclusion policy.
I have two other thoughts: they are there to keep some kind of attention on the spiritual rather than what’s for lunch in the face of the platitudes of droning parsons. And they are also there to cater for our love of a laugh, particularly, well, yes, an irreverent one.
The gargoyles, of course. And the marvellously named hunky-punks, to be found often hunkered on the tops of Somerset churches, distinguished from gargoyles for not having their practical purpose of water piping, and so termed grotesques.
And carvings on misericords, the seats that could be raised for a happier halfway of resting your bottom on the edge while still standing, almost. What a gallery of relishable rudery and ribaldry, allegedly permitted because they were so close to the fundament.
Things become even more complicated by the sheela na gigs, mostly Irish grotesques being just that with the female vulva: take your pick from fertility goddess, warning against lust, sheer misogyny, female empowerment, or just rude:
Elsewhere, you won’t get a clearer clue to the laughing thing than the jests of the stone masons, sometimes hidden away, sometimes not.
And then there are the putti, the fat baby angels seen throughout renaissance and later religious art and architecture, specialised in by Donatello, and there for no other reason, surely, than to give a smile.
Earlier in Bologna, I had been sitting in the chapel of St Dominic in his Basilica, taking a break after the super-bling of Nicolo Pisano’s Ark containing the remains of the great saint and founder of friars (the young Michelangelo given just the one candle-holding angel). And then I looked up idly, like so many must have done in so many churches over the centuries, and I saw this looking down at me (zoom in for a closer view):
Anyway, it warmed the heart of this miserable sinner.
April 15
Greta Garbo took her final curtain on this date in 1990, aged 84. Her remarkable looks and determined reclusiveness made her once the most famous film actress, if not woman, in the western world.
Her most-remembered moment is the ending of ‘Queen Cristina’ (1933), as the tragic Swedish monarch sails away from her throne, taking with her the lifeless body of the man for whom she has abandoned it, and who has just died in her arms, slain by the sword of her treacherous minister and jealous former lover. (The present lover was played by her former lover, John Gilbert.)
The shot, using 85 feet of film, gets closer and closer to Garbo’s face, which rewards it with a look that seems to express all of the above, and yet at the same time, nothing.
Clarence Brown, who directed seven of Garbo's pictures, told an interviewer, ‘Garbo has something behind the eyes that you couldn't see until you photographed it in close-up. You could see thought.’
Yes, well, but this is what Rouben Mamoulian, the director of this scene, told Garbo when she asked what should be expressing: ‘Nothing. Absolutely nothing. You must make your mind and your heart a complete blank. Make your face into a mask. Do not even blink your eyes while the camera is on you.’
Movies, eh? Particularly as Mamoulian had to talk the terrible MGM studio head, Louis B Mayer, out of his insistence that the film should have a happy ending.
There is much more about GG, as she insisted close friends call her. One of my favourites is Groucho Marx, approaching her on the studio lot, going into his famous crouch, looking up under one of her famously large and concealing floppy hats, and saying, ‘Pardon me, Ma’am, I thought you were a guy I knew in Pittsburgh’.
April 14
Nature notes: now that Spring is here, it might be helpful to point out some differences between various animals.
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Newts have smooth, moist skins, lizards are scaly. Additionally, newts have four toes on their front feet, whereas lizards generally have five.
A crow’s call is ‘caw-caw’, while a raven goes ‘gron-gronk’.
Alligators have broad snouts, while crocodiles have narrow ones. You may have different priorities if you are close to either, but crocodiles also show their bottom teeth when their mouths are closed. In the event you are too close, it might be helpful to recall that most victims drown before being dismembered and eaten. (Do NB that ‘most’.)
Black bears are smaller than brown (grizzly) bears. Polar bears are larger than both. There is a helpful saying if you encounter any of them: ‘Black, fight back; Brown, get down; White, good night’.
Black bears can be scared off, but the best course with the more aggressive grizzly is to lie down and play dead, when, with luck, you will be only lightly mauled. Fortunately, you are unlikely to encounter a polar bear unless you are in the Arctic, or at a zoo, where you would also be strongly advised to watch out for more than bears:
I should note, too, that black bears can be brown, brown bears can be black, and female grizzlies can be the same size as black bears. Playing dead also leaves you open to being carried off to the grizzly’s food store. Never try to outrun a bear, as they are very fast indeed; however, if there’s a convenient slope and you’re sufficiently desperate, you might try it, as a bear's front paws are considerably shorter than its back ones, so it will most likely go head over heels if it charges down after you.
Please note that I disclaim responsibility for any unfortunate outcomes that might result from following any of my helpful advice.
Finally, the difference between a buffalo and a bison is that you can’t wash your hands in a buffalo.
Thank you; more tips for the outdoors very soon!
April 13
Alan Clark, ‘politician, historian and sexual profligate’, as William Donaldson described him in his ‘Brewer’s Rogues, Villains and Eccentrics’, was born on this date in 1928.
To this ought to be added three further descriptions. The first is diarist: his are fascinating for their insights into the internal workings of politics, unmediated by the usual discretion and the slightest concern for the feelings of others.
The second comes from him: ‘I am not a Fascist. Fascists are shopkeepers, I am a Nazi’.
The third is, as you can see from the second, crashing snob. If you wish to know more about the risible nuances of English class barriers, might I suggest examining the relationship between Clark and the more talented Michael Heseltine?
Heseltine, to the uninitiated, might appear an exemplary example of an upper class Englishman: the voice, the carriage, the mien, the slight aloofness.
But for Clark, there was one crucial aspect that condemned his political rival to eternal inferiority: he had bought his own furniture.
Indeed. This is a sneaky reference to Heseltine being the grandson of a tea salesman on one side and a dock labourer on the other, while Clark was the son of Kenneth Clark, Lord Clark, the noted art historian, museum director and television lecturer.
However, for the earnest student, I regret that at this point I need to introduce a further complication: Kenneth Clark was himself considered an arriviste because his family had been in trade (Scottish textiles).
Whatever, there is also this remark attributed to Heseltine: ’Clark’s failure to achieve the success that he, if no one else, might have thought his gifts merit, arises from the fact that he inherited his father’s furniture but not his intellect.’
I will know sink back into my Parker Knoll.
April 12
Technology, as we know, can be a curse as well as a blessing. Timing for instance can be, as we say in Lancashire, a bit of a bugger. Peter Hesketh-Fleetwood, who died on this date in 1866, stands as an excellent example.
The second barrel of his surname is the clue: Sir Peter was the founder of Fleetwood, Lancashire, the town at the top of the Fylde Peninsula that contemplates the mighty Morecambe Bay, with its shrimps, broad expanses and wide skies.
Peter was, in that common but slightly strange obsession of the British male, very keen on steam trains. He was there at the Rainhill Trials of George Stephenson’s Rocket in 1828, became a close observer of the rapid development of the railway, and decided to join in.
Stephenson’s pioneering had a limit: he was convinced that trains would never be able to surmount the heights of Shap Fell in the Lake District, and, even if they did, no brakes could hold them on the descent. The way from England to Scotland was barred.
Thus Peter’s big idea: a railway line from the south to his land where Fleetwood now stands, there to take a steamer up to Ardrossan just below Glasgow.
He did not do things by halves. The architect of the day, Decimus Burton, designer of the Wellington Arch and the Palm House at Kew, was commissioned to build not one but two magnificent sandstone lighthouses and a wonderfully state-of-the-art hotel, with a name to match the terminus 250 miles away at the other end of the line: The North Euston Hotel.
By 1847, all was ready. Queen Victoria came down from Ardrossan to take the train to London. All the town’s lights were switched on as the royal yacht was sighted, and they all failed, including the lighthouses. In that same year, almost inevitably, trains began to whizz up Shap Fell.
As you see, indeed a bit of a bugger. And there is more. Founders have to be dreamers as well, and Peter was certainly that. He was MP for Preston on what was almost a socialist ticket, including abolishing the death penalty. He was a friend of the great social reformer Robert Owen. Fleetwood was not only to be a railway town but a Lancashire holiday resort to succour and salve the tired and huddled of the mills and mines. Burton called it ‘Peter’s Golden Dream’.
He underwrote it all, and lost it all, dying near penniless. But Fleetwood, the lighthouses and the North Euston are still there, even if the railway station was knocked down in 1966. The town has had to contend with the collapse of its trawler industry, and the tourist flight to the sun, but it’s still there, too.
And so is Fisherman’s Friend, the small lozenges first made in 1865, and described by their biggest fan, Emmanuel Macron, as the energy providers that ‘rip your throat out’: ‘When speaking publicly, he needs water, some slices of lemon and a small dish of Fisherman’s’.
Good, but not quite as good as one of my favourite facts: the annual production of lozenges would go five times round the world.
We say: Dream on!
April 11
‘Pygmalion', Shaw’s popular play, which made an even more popular musical, opened at His Majesty’s on this date in 1914, months before the First World War transformed it instantly into a nostalgic trip back to the Edwardian world of settled order and rank disturbed by the odd eccentric or foreigner.
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A reworking itself of the Greek legend of the sculptor who fell in love with his creation, brought to life as Galatea, it had, remarkably, its premiere in translation in Vienna. This is not quite as surprising coming from that odd eccentric, George Bernard Shaw, who did his best to further unsettle things by thereafter playing around with the ending, when Professor Higgins, the Pygmalion, doesn’t quite satisfactorily get Galatea, the flower girl, Eliza Doolittle.
Shaw later wrote an afterword insisting that Eliza had gone on to marry Freddy Eynsford-Hill, Eliza’s infatuated young suitor. He had them running a florists happily ever after, but that doesn’t sit quite right with many, including a presumptuous me. Still, leaving aside the cantankerous Professor Higgins, the idea of Eliza and Freddy as a couple is nevertheless an appealing one, so I decided to write a story featuring them on a sticky country house stay alongside another key guest, Edward VII, naturally.
The debt to PG Wodehouse in my story is as clear as that owed to Mr Shaw: my Freddy is an undisguised tribute to Bertie Wooster, who made his bow a year later, in 1915. Other borrowed characters include Sherlock Holmes.
There’s a flavour of it here: the king, who is staying with Lord Thornfield and his wife Elsie, a former paramour, is being blackmailed by none other than the dastardly Irene Adler, the only woman admired by S Holmes. In his search for a solution to this difficulty, he is perhaps unlucky to come across Freddy, also a guest:
Eynsford
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April 10
‘Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast.’Macbeth, declaiming ruefully above, had a bit of trouble sleeping, which was not that surprising, and deserved. But it does seem unfair that insomnia also affects people who haven’t seized a throne after bloodily slaughtering the incumbent while he slept, a guest to boot (and stab).
I’m not sure how much consolation it is, either, that sleeplessness seems to trouble those with imagination the most. The remarkable mysteries of the unconscious tend to pall as an intriguing topic around three in the morning.
I have no cure, obviously, but I can pass on a few tips from the famous.
Dickens was severely afflicted. Irritatingly energetic as he was, though, he turned this to advantage by concocting his plots and fancies on endless nocturnal expeditions through the streets of London. He also thought creativity was best achieved by sleeping facing north; when travelling, he took a compass with him for the purpose.
An interesting contrast is with Emily Brontë, she of the fiercely concentrated emotions as opposed to the exuberance of Dickens. Rather than go for long walks, she walked round and round the dining table.
Besides the helicopter and the enigmatic smile, Leonardo is also credited with inventing polyphasic sleep, a fancy term for taking lots of naps, in his case a 20-minute kip every few hours. I do have doubt about the originality of this, as monks had been regularly interrupted in their sleep from much earlier (mostly to stop them freezing to death on cold nights). Tesla was the same, apparently.
Churchill was also an advocate and practitioner of the power nap, but the astonishing alcohol intake might also have had something to do with that.
Edison believed that the period between consciousness and sleep was the most creative, and also napped. Being an inventor there had of course to be a twist: he would hold a metal ball in each hand: when he fell asleep, the balls would drop and he would immediately leap to his notepad to jot down the ideas that had occurred. I tried this and gave myself the most tremendous shock, almost electric you might say, and was in no fit state to remember anything for quite some time.
Seeking to serve all, I am able to reassure good sleepers with Einstein’s solid ten hours a night, supplemented by daytime naps. But I would like to take this opportunity to nail the canard that the theory of special relativity came from a dream about cows being electrocuted: a misreading of an excitable commentator’s inelegant metaphor.
But, make of this what you will - and feel free to try your own experiment - the great man never wore socks.
Still awake?
April 9
Tom Lehrer, born on this day in 1928, is a very funny very old thing. For many of the post-war generation, in Britain at least, he was the first introduction to the pre-Victorian idea that you can be bitingly irreverent and insulting as long as it’s true, clever, and, above all, yes, funny.
Here are some funny things about Lehrer:
He performed for fewer than ten years, ending in 1960, and wrote only a handful of songs after that.
He has been mostly an university academic, teaching mathematics with the occasional diversion into musical comedy until his retirement in in 2001.
He paid $15 to record his first album.
He managed to get away in the US in the 1950s with lyrics like this, from ‘I Wanna Go Back to Dixie’:
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'I wanna start relaxin’
Down in Birmingham or Jackson.
When we're havin' fun, why, no one interferes.
I wanna talk with southern gentlemen
And put my white sheet on again.
I ain't seen one good lynchin' in years.'(Make what you will of the mini flutter when the nonagenarian barrister Nemone Lethbridge selected it recently on ‘Desert Island Discs’.)
His breakthrough in Britain came when Princess Margaret was given an honorary doctorate in music and it was revealed that she was ‘a connoisseur of music and a performer of skill and distinction, her taste being catholic, ranging from Mozart to the calypso, from opera to the songs of Miss Beatrice Lillie to Tom Lehrer.’
He said that performing was like going on stage and reading out a book you’d written again and again.
He rarely gives interviews, probably for the same reason.
His most famous quote is, ‘Political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel peace prize’. That was in 1973, and he has made no pronouncement since, probably for that reason, or because this, from 1965, says it all:
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‘The poor folks hate the rich folks
And the rich folks hate the poor folks.
All of my folks hate all of your folks,
It’s American as apple pie.’In 2020, he took a step unprecedented in the copyright maximisation world of music, placing all his in the public domain. His statement ended, ‘Don’t send me any money’.
I’ll leave you with this classic, which in a way, he seems to be seeking to fulfil:
April 8
Margaret Thatcher died on this date in 2013. Admired, despised, endlessly analysed. Biographies, feature films still coming, she remains the best litmus for political stance, the view firmly settled, rarely nuanced, still raw after three decades.
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To the student of peripheries and minor detail, one of the most fascinating things about her is the lack of self-awareness allied to an obliviousness to conventional conduct.
Oliver Pritchett, my old friend and talented colleague, has summed this up marvellously:
‘I was reporting on Mrs Thatcher’s campaign for The Sunday Telegraph, as one of the journalists following her around the country in chartered coaches and planes. Those were the days when political leaders were not kept away from the public. I sometimes wondered if the public ought to be protected from Mrs Thatcher.
‘I remember one occasion, on a high street somewhere, a passer-by disagreed with her about something – probably prices – and she stopped to argue with him. He wouldn’t back down and she wouldn’t give in. The argument went on and on. She would step away and then turn back to make another point. Her minders were getting nervous; the schedule was tight. At last they managed to prise her away from the man. I imagined them to be like peacemakers in a late-night pub car park row, saying: “Leave it, Maggie, ’e’s not worth it.”
‘One of her election promises was that she would invite us all to a party in Downing Street when she became prime minister. To our amazement, she kept that promise. We were all there, including the coach drivers, pilots and protection officers. Some people arrived by taxi and got there a few minutes early and Mrs T came to the door of Number 10 to shoo them away till the proper time.’
Thank you, Oliver. I saw some of this myself. On a trip to the Shetland Islands, she advanced firmly on a baby, who at the sight of her launched into one of those terrible wail-and-shriek sequences only granted to babies of a certain age. Mrs Thatcher, completely unperturbed, dispensed some brisk words of advice to the mother and moved serenely on.
I was at the Whitehall Theatre when she attended, gamely it has to be said, John Wells’s very funny farce about her husband, ‘Anyone for Denis?’. I asked her what she had made of it. She responded neither artfully nor angrily, but with a slight puzzlement, ‘That’s not my Denis, that’s not my DT,’ when according to everyone else who knew him, it clearly was, with clever and not unaffectionate licence.
Interestingly, these kinds of oddity have been common to many another prime minister, and, in particular, the notable ones: Pitt the Younger, last encountered fighting an inept duel, famously awkward; Gladstone, the attempting nocturnal saviour of fallen women; Edward Heath, as apparently asexual as Pitt, and almost as devoid of a sense of humour (especially about himself) as Mrs Thatcher.
It was this last lack which made me think a short story taking a rather different approach to the relationship between Mrs Thatcher and Mr Heath might be rather fun:
April 7
‘Hello, Good Evening, and Welcome’. Once that would have been instantly recognisable and irritatingly often imitated, but there is no more telling indicator of the cruel transience of celebrity than the forgotten catch-phrase. Any ideas on ‘Hello, My Darlings’, ‘Say Goodnight Dick’, ‘You Lucky People’, ‘Oh, Calamity!’, ‘I’ll be leaving you now, Sir’, ‘TTFN’, ‘Swinging!’, ‘Oh, you are awful!’?
The opener belonged to David Frost, born on this date in 1939, once so pervasive and influential a television presence that his vanishing into the mists of short memory and shorter attention spans seems rather odder than the authors of those others.
He was, after all, as the nasal accent proclaimed, one of the first of the classless Sixties upmarket television personalities, forever caught by the sneer from Kitty Muggeridge, wife of Malcolm, as ‘rising without trace’. (And who were they again?)
I interviewed him in 1992 for the Independent on Sunday when there was one of those passing but violent television henhouse hoo-hahs involving the transfer of his current affairs programme, ‘Frost on Sunday’, to the BBC, where it ran for the next 12 years.
Dfrosty
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Oh, and those catchphrases: Charlie Drake, Dan Rowan, Tommy Trinder, Robertson Hare, Bill Fraser (of Bootsie and Snudge), Jimmy Young, Norman Vaughan and Dick Emery.
April 6
Today, with thanks, mostly, to John Gross, our leading anthologiser until his death in 2011, some thoughts from other mighty brains on what Yeats called the ‘casual comedy’ of Life:
‘To laugh is proper to Man.’ Rabelais
‘Everything has been said before, but since nobody listens, we have to keep going back and beginning all over again.’ André Gide
‘A hen is only an egg’s way of making another egg.’ Samuel Butler
‘I am not fond of expecting catastrophes, but there is a crack in the Universe.’ Sydney Smith (cf L Cohen)
‘Much will have more.’ Emerson
‘Don’t despair, not even over the fact you don’t despair.’ Kafka
‘Self-love seems so often unrequited.’ Anthony Powell
‘The sole cause of Man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room.’ Pascal
‘Communism is the true resolution of the conflict between existence and essence, objectification and self-affirmation, freedom and necesssity, individual and species. It is the riddle of history solved and knows itself as the solution.’ K Marx
‘I’m not crazy about reality but it’s still the only place to get a decent meal.’ G Marx
April 5
You do have to be careful with certain legends. I believed, for example, until now, that Gene Pitney, the American singer, died 24 hours from Tulsa, in Cardiff, on this date in 2006.
Yet more evidence of the sort of research expected of the reputable miscellanarian, however, narrowly compels me to disclose that the journey from Cardiff Wales Airport to Tulsa International Airport takes a mere 18 hours.
Don’t mention it.
April 4
There is little to regret about our progress away from the fiercely guarded and preposterously minute delineations of Britain’s social classes. Only a committed nostalgic (yes, off he goes again) would mull over the collateral loss of the quaint language exceedingly exclusive to the lower and achingly respectable middle classes, from which I am happy to hail, and even more happy to have left.
When was the last time you heard any of these:
Excuse I
It really is the giddy limit
I’ve had an elegant sufficiency, thank you
Cooeee!
Thank you, I don’t mind if I do
Do you know, I think I’m a little bit tiddly
That’s quite enough of that, thank you
Aren’t people the end?
Mustn’t grumble
Not today, thank you
Too kind, I’m sure
Righty-ho
Well I never!
Mind your ps and qs!
That’s ample for me, thank you
Oh, dear, I’ve got the collywobbles
Well, I ask you!
Thank you kindly!
April 3
Graham Greene died on this date in 1991. The better-qualified have opined exhaustively on his life and letters, the Catholicism, the seedy gloom, the hopeless doom, and whether or not his work will survive.
I want to concentrate instead on a less-known aspect: his nipples. Did you know he had four?
It came to light when Auberon Waugh wrote in Private Eye in that way he had on the pressing matter of the supernumerary male nipple, claiming that a now-forgotten Tory MP but then minister, Patrick Jenkin, had three, an infallible sign that he was in fact a witch.
Greene then wrote to Waugh, confiding that he didn’t have three nipples; he had four. ‘A doctor when I was examined medically at the beginning of World War II made the same remark that in the Middle Ages I would have been regarded as a witch. I haven't addressed this letter to Private Eye because I would hate to think that 150,000 people who buy the paper might want to investigate my four nipples.’
Make of that what you will; I am proud to reveal that the prestigious Burns archive in Boston contains a letter to Greene from me, enquiring further about the nipples.
He didn’t reply, of course, but I wanted to show the kind of penetratingly painstaking research that contributes to this miscellany.
Coming soon: you think you know the Battenberg cake?
April 2
His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, the Negus, King of Kings, Lord of Lords, Conquering Lion of Judah, Elect of God, the Light of the World, Jah, Mighty Inspiration of the Faithful Followers of Rastafari, commenced his reign on this date in 1930. His coronation was an entrancing composition of ancient and modern, Europe and Africa, gorgeous caparisons and bedecked livery, uniforms tailored in London from lion skins, dancing priests, antiphons, canticles, plainsong, all in the sacred tongue of Ghiz; slumbering chiefs and dozing envoys, prostrating crowds, vigilant machine guns, vigorous three-plane flypast, a royal carriage that had belonged to the Kaiser, and a coachman who had driven Franz Joseph, which would have made him venerable at the least. The Duke of Gloucester brought a coronation cake said to weigh a ton. Even Evelyn Waugh was there, and wrote about it, a touch condescendingly and colonially, it has to be said.
I’ve also written about this extraordinary throwback of a man, around whom there still persists a strange, dreamlike magic. You can read an edited extract from my book, ‘Sometimes In Bath’, here:
Emperor
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April 1
There’s research needed on why April Fools are not what they were: someone else can do it. I prefer to remember that on this apt date ‘These Foolish Things’, that most evocative of standards, was published in 1935.
The music was by Jack Strachey, the words by Eric Maschwitz, an urbane, unshy graduate of Cambridge who is also responsible, in every sense, for establishing the BBC’s light entertainment offerings.
Nöel Coward was clear on the strange potency of cheap music. Philip Larkin was sniffy about the lyrics of ‘Foolish Things’ unless it was sung by Billy Holiday. Genre purists point out that the ‘things’ aren’t really foolish. But they do it for me.
The song has been much covered; Robert Cushman in the entertaining ‘Lives of the Great Songs’ makes the point that Sinatra’s version sounds surprisingly like the late Sid James.
Strachey also wrote ‘In Party Mood’, the jaunty theme of Housewives’ Choice on the BBC Light Programme, an instant time-travel device to the 1950s. Come on: ‘dum dee dum dee dum dee dum dee dum dee dum dee daaaa dum’.
Maschwitz wrote the lyrics to two other popular classics, ‘Goodnight Vienna’, in the 1920s, delivered with a charming wistfulness by Jack Buchanan (qv, naturally), and that other 1930s hymn to Mayfair, ‘A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square’, with the incomparable line featuring those angelic Ritz diners.
If I tell you that he wrote ‘Foolish Things’ one Sunday morning between sips of coffee and vodka, it will come as less of a surprise that he had a lively marriage with Hermione Gingold, the deeply eccentric actress and revue artist best remembered now for her duet with a less hard to take than usual Maurice Chevalier in ‘I Remember It Well’, from Lerner and Loewe’s severally dubious ‘Gigi’.
In her posthumously compiled memoir, ‘How to Grow Old Disgracefully’, Gingold describes dashing from a performance to catch the final curtain at the first night of one of Eric’s musicals, ‘Balalaika’. Eric was at the back of the stalls, shouting, ‘Author! Author!’ before rushing up to take a bow.
I once knew a similarly plaintive version, but sadly can remember no more than, ‘The tattered remnants of a late-night final, the sound of laughter from the men’s urinal’. Anyone?
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