Dining in splendour beneath Van Dycks as we forked in the delicious venison, it was hard not to agree with my neighbour that we were in illustrious company and in one of the most beautiful rooms in England. Our hosts had, however, as we agreed, been bold in the choice of multinational guests, many of whom had never met one another. A challenge for the shy. How much easier, we said, were children’s parties. If all dinner parties had conjurors, or games of Pass the Parcel and Musical Chairs, they would lose their terror for those of us who still feel tongue-tied by social demands. Lo and behold! As we swept down the stairs for our coffee in the Great Hall, there stood a smiling young man called Archie Manners, with 20 chairs arranged in rows. There followed an hour of the most brilliant magic. As well as card tricks, he did mind-reading. Some of my fellow guests were inventors of brilliance, but even the cleverest were baffled. When his show finished, we kept Archie up for hours beyond midnight, as he repeatedly bamboozled us all.
The Betjeman Society had a fascinating meeting last week, at which Ian Curteis showed the TV play which he directed and the poet wrote, Pity About the Abbey (1965). I’d misremembered it — wrongly believing the satire ended with Westminster Abbey being demolished to make way for a multi-storey carpark. In fact, it is reprieved, which isn’t such a good ending, but it is still full of bitingly accurate observations of civil servants and plansters. Surely it’s worth rebroadcasting — with Curteis’s spry introduction?
My friend Jill Hamilton died last Sunday, one of the most beautiful and outrageous of Australian imports into this country.
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