Society

My father was a lifelong socialist. He joined the Labour party at the age of 16 and at the time of his death, 70 years later, he was a Labour member of the House of Lords. He was a fairly typical left-winger in that he preferred the company of the poor to the rich and he regarded conspicuous consumption — particularly that of the nouveau riche — as the eighth deadly sin. However, he did have one capitalist vice: he was obsessed with cars. This may explain why during his most politically active phase, when he was plotting the downfall of the ruling class, he drove a Bentley. I was

During my rather dry investigation last week of apostrophes on the London Underground map, I found something far more interesting. It is the anagram Underground map invented two years ago by the pseudonymous Barry Heck (after the great Underground mapper Harry Beck). Transport for London, as they call themselves at the moment, asserted, no doubt correctly, their own copyright in the map, and clamped down on reproduction of the anagram version. But the anagram names of the stations are not their copyright and may be discussed without locking the door. The anagrams were apparently done with an online anagram generator. To make them with a paper and pencil would be

Brad is cool. He was clearly demonstrating his ability to retain grace under pressure and I suppose that’s what conductors get paid for. The traffic on the A40 was at a standstill at Gypsy Corner and he was due to conduct Verdi’s Il trovatore in Holland Park very shortly. I was much more scared about being late than he was. I gingerly invoked the unthinkable. ‘What’s going to happen if we’re, you know, er, not there in time?’ ‘The conductor is the one person they have to wait for,’ he said, and lit a Marlboro. ‘Have you learnt the words?’ I’m learning how to conduct as part of an experiment