The Spectator's Notes

27 January 2007

More from TV Licensing (see previous Notes). Via my office, I received an email from this authority following up what I had written and inviting me to get in touch. I rang the number, but, after 15 minutes of a voice saying ‘Your call is important to us ...’, rang off. This week I rang again and got the man who had emailed. He could not remember why he had got in touch with me, even when I reminded him. So he asked for my postcode in order to check, and then rang me back. He said he was sorry I was offended by their letters but that another letter had just been sent (‘I can’t stop it’), acknowledging that I claimed not to have a television in my flat and informing me that staff would visit me to see if I was telling the truth. Then he asked me for my postcode all over again....

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One naturally rejoices at the success of one’s friends’ children, and so I was pleased to see the publication of The Night Climbers (Doubleday) by Ivo Stourton, an exciting novel about students who swindle a rich college. But when I read in the blurb that the author was born in 1982 I could hear the noise of time’s winged chariot. 1982! Doesn’t that make him about ten years old? When I became editor of The Spectator, Wendy Cope wrote a gloomy poem entitled ‘The editor of The Spectator is only 27’. Now I’m on her side.