Close Encounters

Corbett: the embodiment of charm

How many chance encounters have you had with famous people? Genuinely chance encounters? I mean bumping into them in supermarkets, pubs or railway stations rather than meeting them at controlled, carefully-planned events such as openings, prizegivings, fetes? What are the odds against bumping into first Ronnie Corbett and then, years later, Robert Morley, outside the very same Duke Street St James's entrance of Fortnum & Mason in Piccadilly, London? Massive I'd have thought, but this is exactly what happened to me. The two men's reactions were markedly different. Corbett was the embodiment of charm, even though the collision was entirely my fault for not looking where I was going. "My dear fellow," he said, clasping both my hands in his. "I'm so terribly sorry!" Morley was a different proposition, very sour about the whole thing, even though it was he not I who had barged carelessly out of F&M. "Whill you look where you're going?" he testily cried (note the 'h'), before pulling a sort of horrified Frankie Howerd-type face at a group of mystified Japanese passers-by. And then there are pubs. Once, some fifteen years ago on a Sunday evening, I called in at The Hour Glass, on the corner of Walton Street and Brompton Road in Knightsbridge. Very quiet, no music, open fire, clock ticking, dusk. That dates it. At a table in the corner near the fire sat a man entirely hidden behind a copy of the Sunday Times. I ordered a whisky and soda and, barbarically, a packet of crisps which I began to try to open, noisily and ineptly. Down came the newspaper - and there, animated by the flickering chiaroscuro of the fire, was the expressionless but terrifying face of Donald Pleasance. I've never to this day messed around with crisps in a quiet pub. Returning to collisions, my son Sebastian (10) is showing some promise, as witnessed by an episode in Tesco in Hampstead a few years ago. He was - I should never have allowed this - tearing around the aisles on a scooter. He ran headlong into a tall, strapping, Teutonic-looking figure who had been carrying (and had now dropped) a case of Evian water. "My dear fellow," I said. "I'm so terribly sorry!"  "No worries! No worries at all!" beamed the big-hearted Arsenal goalkeeper (and now also, I see, film actor), Jens Lehmann. That's about it. "I bet there are some famous people we could bump into in the London Library, dad." says Sebastian, helpfully and hopefully intending to engineer a few memorable collisions. I know what he has in mind. Didier Drogba and John Terry poring over Illustrated London News match reports featuring Stanley Matthews. Cheryl Cole mugging up on the social history of Vaudeville. Lady Gaga feeding her an insistent inner craving for Cicero. We live in hope, but our stack-prowling to date has been to no avail.

Distinctly not 'Fluttering and dancing in the breeze'...

We have a selection of ties...

Invited for mid-morning coffee at the Ritz but barred entry by a gratuitously noisy mid-European Rosa Klebb type on the grounds that I was wearing a cravat, not the obligatory tie. "We have a selection of ties you can choose from..." she said huskily, her muscles rippling beneath the livery. So we decamped to the ever congenial Franco's in Jermyn Street (more of which shortly). I take the point - dress codes should be observed - but what became of the old school deference, discretion and kindliness an incorrectly dressed person would certainly have encountered at the Ritz a quarter of a century ago? And - another sign of the times - it seems faintly absurd to insist that non-residents pole up dressed like tailor's dummies in a golf club when guests who are actually staying at the Ritz (particularly Yanks, it has to be said) think nothing of shambling through the lobby in North Face anoraks and Uggs. Other areas require attention too, in particular the extremely scruffy window boxes outside the Rivoli Bar in the Ritz's Piccadilly-facing arcade. It doesn't take a Wordsworth to work out that daffodils look awful in planters. Their charm is very much of the 'here today, gone tomorrow' stamp: ablaze in a distant landscape they're one thing: in a window box they do little more than evoke a suburban roundabout. So get with it, Ritz. Fire Rosa Klebb. And get a decent, thoughtful, poetry-reading gardener to tend the boxes. Over at Franco's, the usual immaculate service - and an agreeably bizarre note in both ladies and gents lavatories - loudspeakers overhead emitting the quiet, homely but unmistakeably insistent tones of Alan Bennett reading stories from Winnie the Pooh.

Kindling Respect

Spent a literary afternoon with my sons Inigo (7) and Sebastian (9), exploring my Kindle. The inbuilt dictionaries proved useful for Scrabble - note in the photograph the strategic use of ki, the life force and ka, one's spiritual "double" in the mythology of ancient Egypt (does anyone these days still read Dennis Wheatley? The Ka of Gifford Hillary is a pretty disturbing novel). Purchases were made. The Kindle History of Chelsea Football Club, a substantial modern classic, cost 71p (remarkably cheap) whereas Roald Dahl's Big Friendly Giant cost £5.99 which is more or less what it costs in bookshops. But that's not the point. It's remarkably convenient having all these books to hand in such an elegant device - I feel as though I'm Richard Porson with "all Bodley" in my pocket. True, quite a few people - mainly geeks - have fallen into the kindergarten trap of criticising the Kindle for not being what it wasn't supposed to be in the first place. It isn't a flash multi-media device built for movie junkies and Facebook addicts: the Kindle is supposed to be like a book - and it is. It's discreet, portable, pocket-sized, beautifully designed and has that precious, tactile, "it's mine" quality that makes a book a friend and something not to be lightly lent. It also provokes respect and envy - I've noticed people eyeing me up on the tube as I strap-hang from West Hampstead to Piccadilly reading John Evelyn's Discourse on Salletts (free). I'd go as far as to say that young crims will soon start stealing Kindles, the true test in modern times of whether something has 'arrived' or not being the extent to which people will want to nick it. I predict that soon every self-respecting crime-baron's floozy is going to insist on a croc-covered Kindle to underpin her intellectual credentials at the spa: Kindle owners are educated people, possessing an erudition and self-assurance that it is far beyond the scope of the i-pad or smartphone to confer.