The Wintle Blog

We walked for six hours, at first beside a narrow river and then climbing high into the Chiltern Hills. When we set off, there were scarcely any leaves on the trees, but the sun blazed and temperatures climbed, and by evening buds had opened and shoots had shot, butterflies were dancing, fish jumping, and the world was sprinkled green and bright. It was as if, at last, someone had found the keys to the kennel and the hounds of Spring, unleashed, had burst out in a frenzy. I’m picking books at random off the shelves, at present, letting my fingers make the choice for a re-reading. Before the walk, last Thursday morning, they reached me down for my journeys on the underground the formidable American critic Harold Bloom’s Kabbalah and Criticism . These fingers, perhaps, are curious to see whether their mental equivalents have more luck grasping the meaning of the book than they did first time around (A: only a little). Bloom writes of the Sefirot (the interlinking orbs of the great figu...

I have been silent, on this blog, for a while, because swarming events have, for once, left a man who likes to be a man of words bereft of them. This week I spent some hours holding the bruised and purple hand of a 95-year-old lady in a hospital bed. She told me she was close to death. That probably is true, but how close, I do not know. After all, we can’t (or shouldn’t?) control the gates of time, although she opened them for me. Anyway, at some point as an evening gathered grey around the place, between gasps for breath she murmured from memory this poem, by William Butler Yeats. On the train back to London I spent an hour or so memorising it myself, which seemed both an act of devotion, and a duty, and a foolishness. Make of its alchemy and symbols what you may – and I am now trying with some intensity to muddle through them – but I think you will agree that the cut in time and space between the second and third verses is one of the most dramatic and poignant ever accomplished by a...

I found a new verb, this weekend. To platform, or to be platformed. Picked it up on the 11:06 from Paddington to Castle Cary. We drew up, unwontedly, just outside Reading, and if there was any possibility of hearing, locally, a single blackbird singing, or even, farther and farther, all the birds of Berkshire, it was obliterated by the guard’s announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, it looks as if we’re going to be held outside the station waiting for a platform. Please do not attempt to leave the train until we are fully platformed and stationary within the station.” To platform. To shape like a plat. Which is, I discover, a map or a plan, or a variant of plait, as in braid. Or, better, the French word, one half of plat-du-jour. I think, therefore, that to platform is to imagine the dish you’d most like to eat at your next meal, and to platform fully is to realise in your imagination not just the dish, but the place in which you’d most like to eat it. So as the train leaves Reading and...

Here’s the deal: I own a horse, you have a big stable. So you look after my black beauty and hire him out to make money, and I get a trot or a canter when I want one. A fair arrangement? I think so. Now let’s suppose, unexpectedly, you write to me and say, “we have made available, carefully selected to suit your lifestyle, a menagerie consisting of six goats, three rabbits, a brace of pheasants and a duck. All of these are potentially of great value to you, and therefore we now propose to charge you substantially for the stabling of your horse, which we will continue to hire out for our profit.” At which point I reflect that I have no use for goats, rabbits are three-a-penny in the marketplace, pheasant is a delicacy I disdain, and I already sourced my own duck. What should I do next? Moving on, here’s a letter I received this month from Lloyds Bank, about an account I opened a few years before the start of the ultimate quarter of the last century (coy, moi?): Dear Mr Wintle Your gold ...

The Annual General Meeting of the Worshipful Guild of Media Trainers was held in the upstairs chamber, the Lens & Pen Inn, London EC1. Members present included “resting” actors, former political advisers, sidelined PR practitioners, “life” coaches, redundant BBC presenters (female; over the age of 35), sundry other superannuated reporters and camera-people and the usual phalanx of casualties from Mrs Thatcher’s bargain-basement ITV auction of two decades ago (most still smarting from, and whining about, the injustice of it all). Addressing the meeting, the President, the Very Worshipful Bro. A. Djing-Hack, said it would be no exaggeration to say that the profession, or craft – for so he preferred to describe it [applause] – was facing the greatest crisis in its long and venerable history. He was referring, he explained, to the recent appearance of the former Prime Minister, Mr Tony Blair, at the Chilcott Inquiry into the war in Iraq. The President continued: “In the welter of comm...

If I were going to make a TV documentary about the Cadbury-Kraft affair, I’d certainly want to include footage of Margaret Thatcher’s visit to the English confectioners’ home in Bourneville, just outside Birmingham (that’s Warwickshire, UK, not Alabama, USA). She went there in April, 1979, at the start of her victorious battle to become UK Prime Minister. This campaign has been described as Britain’s first “television election”, and Mrs T and her advisers understood exactly what was entailed: instead of talking about politics, she travelled to picturesque places and did vigorous, picturesque things in picturesque costumes, simply because this is what television needed her to do. She wore a white coat and hat. So did the parliamentary sketch writer, Frank Johnson, “and about a hundred television and press photographers and reporters,” as he remembers in his delicious memoir, Best Seat in the House : “the whole effect resembled a lunatic asylum in which the doctors had themselves gone be...

We live in an age of ludicrous hyperbole. I just pushed a supermarket trolley with a banner on it for an instant coffee which didn’t say “good coffee”, but, in gold letters, “GLOWING WITH POLYPHENOL ANTIOXIDANTS.” What? As trolley, banner and I moved along a gently-sloping travelator outside the store, loudspeakers shouted warnings at us which would have been apt had we been roped on the Old Man of Hoy. (I just googled Old Man of Hoy to make sure he wasn’t Hoye and got a sponsored link offering to “Find the Best Results for Pictures Of Old Men!” - What?) You too will have encountered the assistant who stares at you with weary indifference or borderline hostility beneath a sign assuring you that he or she is “passionate about customer service.” My journeys on the C2 bus in London NW1 and NW5 were recently enlivened by signs urging me to “Love Your Local High Street!” Now, Kentish Town Road has a certain, time-warped idiosyncrasy and charm: the Owl Bookshop, sticking two literate finge...