All that jazz

I’m just back from Edinburgh, my 20th successive year at the festival for the Daily Telegraph, which makes me feel very old indeed. How times have changed. When I started going, the paper put us up in the luxurious Sheraton Grand and no questions were asked about the size of your bar bill, which in my case was invariably eye-wateringly large. I also remember becoming bored of eating smoked salmon and Aberdeen Angus steak every day and often feeling desperately lonely in my huge, superbly appointed but utterly soulless room.

But for at least a decade now Telegraph hacks have been lodged in communal flats, like students, with some of us not pulling our weight on the washing-up and putting-out-the-rubbish fronts. Not that this matters when our delightfully Eeyoreish opera critic (and Spectator contributor) Rupert Christiansen is in residence. There is nothing he likes more than putting on his pinny, snapping on the Marigolds and giving the kitchen a really good seeing-to.

I initially hated the idea of communal living in middle-age, felt squeamish about having to share bathrooms and loos with others, and yearned for room service at the Sheraton. Over the years, however, I’ve come to like it. You get to know your colleagues better, and almost all of them at the Telegraph are well worth knowing. One year, flat-sharing also afforded me the delectable sight of our spectacularly beautiful diary editor Celia Walden emerging from the shower wrapped only in a fluffy
white towel and looking like a cross between Botticelli’s Venus and Marilyn Monroe. I felt like falling to my knees and worshipping her. Such visions stay with a chap.