Diary

22 November 2008

The daughter and I spent the last few days before the American election in Arizona.

My young friend Nicholas Brown graduated from Yale in 2004 and when his father Sam, a former director of Carter’s Peace Corps and US ambassador, asked him what he was going to do to make the world a better place, Nicholas said that in his free time he was working for this guy in Chicago, Barack Obama, who was running for the Senate. ‘He’s the man,’ he assured his father. Sam admits that on hearing the name he laughed and told Nicholas to get real. Bully for Nicholas. Even to an experienced eye it’s not always easy to spot a future high achiever. Memorably, Geoffrey Robertson, who was at Oxford at the same time as Bill Clinton, says the Arkansas student made little impact, and that the Rhodes Scholar of that year who looked the most likely future president of the United States was Paul Gambaccini.

To Norfolk for one of my favourite annual gigs, judging a heat of the Thomas Cranmer Awards at Castle Rising. That most dashing of Tory peers, Greville Howard, hosts the event at which pupils from surrounding schools have to read a passage from the Book of Common Prayer. As a lukewarm cradle Catholic, I’m the least qualified person to preside, except that I’m passionate about the usefulness to youngsters of learning to speak in public. The entries were impressive; the winners exceptional. To each I ask: ‘Are you going into the performing arts?’ Alas no. One says he wants to be a lawyer, the other an engineer. Meanwhile Greville’s New Year ambition is to invite Governor Palin to shoot.

The traffic from Pinewood Studios to the Mall was so bad on Tuesday last week that I missed Brian Sewell opening the Discerning Eye exhibition. By the time I arrived people were standing six-deep with their backs to the pictures, quaffing champagne and having those pointless conversations about exactly how near they live to each other in Hampshire. Anyway, I spotted just one picture I wanted to buy and was delighted to find Brian had awarded the Michael Reynolds Prize to another oil by the same artist.