MALLORY'S PIPE

I've been reading Robert Graves' autobiography (lower photo) over the past couple of days and, for a moment, in a story about George Mallory (upper) - at that time one of Graves' masters at Charterhouse School - had a sense of literary déja vu. Mallory, you may recall, was the man who disappeared near the summit of Mount Everest in the mid 1920s. There are some (I am among them) who believe he and Irvine climbed the mountain and were lost on the way down. The consensus, however, is that because of the position of the bodies (or body - I can't remember whether both have been found)- they seemed to be ascending as death overtook them.

However, this is not, as they say, à propos. My sense of déja vu came from an earlier tale about George Mallory as a young man and I now remember I read it first in Newby's book, "A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush" before seeing it again, in Graves' book, this morning. Of course repetition doesn't necessarily make a thing true, but it's a good story:

"My friend George Mallory, for instance, who later disappeared close to the summit of Mount Everest, once did an inexplicable climb on Snowdon. He had left his pipe on a ledge, half-way down one of the Lliwedd precipices, and scrambled back by a short cut to retrieve it, then up again by the same route. No one saw what route he took, but when they came to examine it the next day for official record, they found an overhang nearly all the way. By a rule of the Climber's Club climbs are never named in honour of their inventors, but only describe natural features. An exception was made here.

"The climb was recorded as follows: Mallory's Pipe, a variation on Route 2; see adjoining map. This climb is totally impossible. It has been performed once, in failing light, by Mr G.H.L. Mallory."

A Badly Foxed Memoir

I have just read James Lees-Milne's memoir, 'Another Self'. It's a well written piece about life before and, in part, during the second world war but I found myself totally at odds with Mr Lees-Milne - either with his characterization of himself in the book, or worse with an accurate picture of himself that the writing reveals.

Lees-Milne had all the advantages and, despite himself, did all the right things - Eton, Oxford, Brigade of Guards - but flopped about enjoying nothing and contributing little. True, he was a virtual founder of the National Trust - that institution where all buildings under its care are reduced to looking and feeling exactly the same no matter from which period of history they derive - and has a few sad things to say about how much of Georgian England was torn up after the war.

But for the rest, I found him an egregious toss-pot, a dropper of names few have heard of now (and I suspect, few had heard of then), a fantasist whose strongest relationship, by his own description, was unrequited telephone sex with a woman who he 'met' via a crossed-line and whose name he never knew (inevitably, he calls her 'Egeria' after an elusive nymph).

Slightly Foxed is a publisher of a quarterly magazine and occasional memoirs many of which (there are currently eight) have proved to be revelatory and excellent. As I said, this book is no exception but I would not have wanted to know the author - one who would have fought for General Franco in the Spanish Civil War to halt the ravages visited on the Roman Catholic church by the republicans.

In the introduction, Lees-Milne is described as a "tall, slightly etiolated young man, diffidently patrician and dandyish". At another point, tocsins sound when he is congratulated on writing this "delicious memoir". I think 'Curate's Egg' rather than 'delicious'.

Consider this (failed) attempt at a Proustian description following a huge raid on Piccadilly in, I think, 1941. Lees-Milne's opening descriptions of the damage wrought on the area are, at the same time, fascinating and horrifying:

"We could not walk up Piccadilly because a stick of bombs having fallen from the Fifty Shilling Tailors to St James's Church had penetrated a gas main. Tongues of flame were belching from craters in the road. We could not walk down Jermyn Street which was blocked by rubble from collapsed houses. Here I noticed the stripped, torn trunk of a man on the pavement. Further on I picked up what looked like the mottled, spread leaf of a plane tree. It was a detached hand with a signet ring on the little finger."

But then we get:

"Tha pale windows of Arthur's Club in St James's Street were aglow with the reflection of yet another fire. For a moment I thought this fine classical building was blazing. Then I realized that the light was not Pepys's 'horrid malicious bloody' sort, but borrowed and deceptive, the sort of light that greets one from the flickering log fire of a hall seen through the crinkled panes of a country house, as one returns before curtains are drawn after a long autumn walk, having crossed the park, about to tread the mossy lawn, late for tea in the Midlands."

Puleeease.

May I commend you, instead, to the works of Hector Bolitho.

CLARKSON and MANDELSON

I neither claim nor would accept any responsibility for the following which is the text of an article that appeared in the Sunday Times a few days ago. All I will say is that I wish I could write as well as this - and to such good effect.

The enclosed article by Jeremy Clarkson was in this week's Sunday Times but has since been 'pulled'.


I've given the matter a great deal of thought all week, and I'm afraid I've decided that it's no good putting Peter Mandelson in a prison. I'm afraid he will have to be tied to the front of a van and driven round the country until he isn't alive any more.

He announced last week that middle-class children will simply not be allowed into the country's top universities even if they have 4,000 A-levels,because all the places will be taken by Albanians and guillemots and whatever other stupid bandwagon the conniving idiot has leapt

I hate Peter Mandelson. I hate his fondness for extremely pale blue jeans and I hate that preposterous moustache he used to sport in the days when he didn't bother trying to cover up his left-wing fanaticism. I hate the way he quite literally lords it over us even though he's resigned in disgrace twice, and now holds an important decision-making job for which he was not elected. Mostly, though, I hate him because his one-man war on the bright and the witty and the successful means that half my friends now seem to be taking leave of their senses.

There's talk of emigration in the air. It's everywhere I go. Parties. Work. In the supermarket. My daughter is working herself half to death to get good grades at GSCE and can't see the point because she won't be going to university, because she doesn't have a beak or flippers or a qualification in washing windscreens at the lights. She wonders, often, why we don't live in America.

Then you have the chaps and chapesses who can't stand the constant raids on their wallets and their privacy. They can't understand why they are taxed at 50% on their income and then taxed again for driving into the nation's capital. They can't understand what happened to the hunt for the weapons of mass destruction. They can't understand anything. They see the Highway Wombles in those brand new 4x4s that they paid for, and they see the M4 bus lane and they see the speed cameras and the community support officers and they see the Albanians stealing their wheelbarrows and nothing can be done because it's racist.

And they see Alistair Darling handing over £4,350 of their money to not sort out the banking crisis that he doesn't understand because he's a small-town solicitor, and they see the stupid war on drugs and the war on drink and the war on smoking and the war on hunting and the war on fun and the war on scientists and the obsession with the climate and the price of train fares soaring past £1,000 and the Guardian power-brokers getting uppity about one shot baboon and not uppity at all about all the dead soldiers in Afghanistan, and how they got rid of Blair only to find the lying twerp is now going to come back even more powerful than ever, and they think, "I've
had enough of this. I'm off."

It's a lovely idea, to get out of this stupid, Fairtrade, Brown-stained,Mandelson-skewed, equal-opportunities, multicultural, carbon-neutral,trendily left, regionally assembled, big-government, trilingual, mosque-drenched, all-the-pigs-are-equal, property-is-theft hellhole and set up shop somewhere else. But where?

You can't go to France because you need to complete 17 forms in triplicate every time you want to build a greenhouse, and you can't go to Switzerland because you will be reported to your neighbours by the police and subsequently shot in the head if you don't sweep your lawn properly, and you can't go to Italy because you'll soon tire of waking up in the morning to find a horse's head in your bed because you forgot to give a man called Don a bundle of used notes for "organising" a plumber.

You can't go to Australia because it's full of things that will eat you, you can't go to New Zealand because they don't accept anyone who is more than 40 and you can't go to Monte Carlo because they don't accept anyone who has less than 40 mill. And you can't go to Spain because you're not called Del and you weren't involved in the Walthamstow blag. And you can't go to Germany .. because you just can't.

The Caribbean sounds tempting, but there is no work, which means that one day, whether you like it or not, you'll end up like all the other expats,with a nose like a burst beetroot, wondering if it's okay to have a small sharpener at 10 in the morning. And, as I keep explaining to my daughter, we can't go to America because if you catch a cold over there, the health system is designed in such a way that you end up without a house. Or dead.

Canada's full of people pretending to be French, South Africa's too risky,Russia's worse and everywhere else is too full of snow, too full of flies or too full of people who want to cut your head off on the internet. So you can dream all you like about upping sticks and moving to a country that doesn't help itself to half of everything you earn and then spend the money it gets on bus lanes and advertisements about the dangers of salt. But wherever you go you'll wind up an alcoholic or dead or bored or in a cellar, in an orange jumpsuit, gently wetting yourself on the web. All of these things are worse than being persecuted for eating a sandwich at the wheel.

I see no reason to be miserable. Yes, Britain now is worse than it's been for decades, but the lunatics who've made it so ghastly are on their way out. Soon, they will be back in Hackney with their South African nuclear-free peace polenta. And instead the show will be run by a bloke whose dad has a wallpaper shop and possibly, terrifyingly, a twerp in Belgium whose fruitless game of hunt-the-WMD has netted him £15m on the lecture circuit.

So actually I do see a reason to be miserable. Which is why I think it's a good idea to tie Peter Mandelson to a van. Such an act would be cruel and barbaric and inhuman. But it would at least cheer everyone up a bit in the meantime.