An over-the-top Bentley turbo

It was a preposterous car, of course, and not even the car I'd originally wanted.  I had wanted a Rolls Royce Silver Cloud III, the sort of car you step up into, not crawl down into, like a Porsche.  I'd worked out the way to do it was to by a Bentley S3, and have it converted by a Rolls dealer into a Silver Cloud.  I wanted one in light blue and grey, a stunning livery.

Alas, by the time I was able to step into that league the Silver Cloud was history, a 'classic' car, more of a collector's item.  But there was a newer car made by Rolls Royce that looked quite exciting, the Bentley Turbo R.  Furthermore, there were good secondhand values to be had.  I took the plunge.  I knew within seconds I'd done the right thing.  The interior smelled of walnut and leather rather than of oil and petrol.  In the back, set into the backs of the seats in front, were two pull-out cocktail cabinets, each with lead crystal glasses and decanters with sterling silver stoppers. 

It had a massive 6.8 litre engine, powerful enough to thrust you back into your seat with g-forces when you put your foot down.  A car on the horizon up ahead could be alongside in seconds.  Fortunately it had massive disc brakes to match its awesome acceleration.  It was big.  I had a photo taken of me sitting cross-legged in the middle of its gigantic bonnet, and had a garage made to fit it.  It had to go when I moved into Cambridge with its narrow streets, into a house without a garage.  Ah well, at least I'd got the Rolls out of my system.

Meeting the Devil at Paddington

I’m not sure he was the Devil, but I think he might have been.  He didn’t have horns or smell of sulphur, though. Indeed, he looked unmemorably ordinary. It was in Paddington Station, late at night, with massive train delays and cancellations because of bad weather.  I could have cancelled my trip, but I hoped that after a drink there might be a train capable of taking me to my destination.

He was on the stool next to me at the bar, and we struck up a conversation.  It was trivial stuff, as I recall, about how bad the train services were, and how incapable anyone in the UK seemed to be in dealing with bad weather.  At one point, though, for reasons I cannot remember, the subject of Faust came up, and my fellow drinker turned to me and asked me earnestly, “If you were offered everything you wanted in life in return for your immortal soul at the end, would you accept.”  He looked me straight in the eye, and I had the clear and distinct impression that this might have been an offer rather than a question.

If it was an offer, I turned it down, replying no, and telling him that I could get all that anyway.

Getting to Normandy became harder

I saw a Sunday Times article about the conversion of the old harbor in Dives sur Mer into a marina with new homes built around it.  After an inspection visit I bought one, a neat two-bedroomer which I was able to configure with an extra toilet and cupboards before it was completed.  It was perfect for long weekend stays in Normandy because of great transport links.  The budget airline Buzz flew to nearby Caen, where a car could be rented.  A fast hydrofoil ferry went from Newhaven to Dieppe if I wanted to take my own car. Another ferry went to Le Havre, about 20 minutes away.  Over a few years I spent many happy weekends exploring Dives and especially nearby Cabourg, a short walk away along the promenade.  I could see why Marcel Proust fell in love with the place.

Unfortunately Ryanair bought Buzz and closed its Caen operation.  The fast Newhaven hydrofoil was replaced by a much slower conventional ship, and the ferries to Le Havre moved to unsuitable times and took longer.  The only viable route left was to drive down to Dover and go via the Channel Tunnel to Calais, then drive to Normandy.  The trip took over 6 hours each way, including the UK legs, which was too big an expenditure of time for a weekend away.  Reluctantly I sold the Normandy house and bought a flat in Nice.  Brilliantly served by easyJet, it took me a fraction of the time to get to and from it.  And it was warmer and drier in Nice than it had been in Normandy.

The bag of vomit that changed history

The question is, did a bag of vomit change history?  My friend Steve Masty was staying over at my London flat.  His attitude to personal hygiene was somewhat slipshod and when, in the middle of the night, he felt the need to be sick, having drunk a fair amount of alcohol, he couldn't remember where the bathroom was.  Rather than make a mess over the floor of my spare bedroom, he resourcefully vomited into a stout paper bag he found in the room, and dropped it from the window one floor down onto the pavement of the street below.  He told me about it the next morning. 

My colleague came in the next day expressing outrage at something he'd seen. 

"That's it," he exclaimed with disgust, "I'm leaving this country! Do you know what I just saw? A bag of vomit lying on the street outside."

I never told him its source and, true to his word, he left the UK as soon as he could to live and work in the US.  His younger brother took his place in the UK, and the two of us built up the Adam Smith Institute over the years.  But for that bag of vomit, things might have turned out differently.

A Concorde day return to Egypt

I received a windfall £5.000 unexpectedly, and decided to spend £1.000 of it on something I’d long wanted to do.  To fly Concorde transatlantic with its all first class seats costing about £5,000, was way beyond my budget.  But there was a firm that chartered Concorde for leisure trips, one of which offered a day return to Egypt.  I booked it. 

We took off at 8.00 am after champagne at Heathrow.  We could not go supersonic over land, so we flew just below it until we reached the Adriatic, at which point we shot rapidly to Mach 2, indicated in big red digital letters on the bulkhead.  All of us had a brief visit to the cockpit itself.  Through the small windows I saw a curved Earth under a black sky, since we flew twice as high as a conventional jetliner.

In Cairo I rode a camel in the desert, saw the treasures of Tutankhamun in the museum of antiquities, visited a souk, ate lunch in a marquee, and saw the pyramids and the Sphinx.  We went to the Nile for a picnic before leaving. 

Taking off from Cairo, as we climbed to altitude, the pilot’s laconic voice came on, “Well, I guess that’s quite enough noise abatement for the citizens of Cairo,” as he hit the throttle to shoot us to Mach 2 again.  We landed at 10.00 pm that night.  Had my grandfather visited Cairo, he would probably have spent 6 months packing for the trip. I did it in a day return.

Catching daytime flights back from the US

I travelled between the US and the UK many times, especially when I was invited on speaking tours of the US, and later when I had a house built on Ramrod Key in Florida. The curse of transatlantic flights was the overnight journey back to the UK.  Sometimes I was lucky and had a row to myself in economy to stretch out along.  Quite often, however, I had to sit up all night in a not very comfortable seat, lucky to nod off for maybe an hour.  The next couple of days were not pleasant

Then I discovered the daytime flights.  From New York initially, but later from a couple of other airports, there was one daytime flight that took off in the morning and landed in the evening in London.  Typically it might take off about 8.00 am and land at perhaps 7.30 pm, with 5 of those hours on the clock.  I made it my routine to check into a cheap New York airport hotel the previous night, in order to catch the flight home next morning.  I’d arrive back, have drinks with friends, staying up as late as I could, and wake up totally refreshed after a good night’s sleep with no jet lag at all.

I did this for a quarter of a century, and still do it as often as I can.  What has changed the equation since, however, is the provision of full flat beds in business class, plus my ability to afford them.

Driving across America from North to South

It was more of a case of driving down America, rather than across it.  I was a Professor at Hillsdale College in Michigan, required to speak at meetings in various US cities that featured newspapers owned by the group that supported my appointment there.  I had developed a fear of flying, and took a couple of years avoiding it as far as possible.  It might have been the experience of being bounced around in an electric storm over the mountains of North India.  I took to driving or taking trains wherever possible, and would take one of the college cars on lengthy trips, sometimes with a student to drive it.

One March day we left Hillsdale still under 3 feet of snow, some of which had fallen in December.  We took 2 days, stopping at a motel overnight before arriving in Florida to warm sunshine, and paddled in temperate waters.  After my speech we chartered a fishing boat for an afternoon of blazing sunshine.  I realized then how big the US is, to have such a temperature variation across it.  I discovered from the car radio on the way that the music of most of America was country, with rock’n’roll and blues largely a city phenomenon.  But my main discovery was that on its South coast, the US had warmer winters.

The experience warmed me to winter sunshine, and subsequently to enjoying at least some winter time in the Florida Keys, where I later built a house.

Caring for kittens

When I was a student sharing a flat at St Andrews, it was a fairly impoverished existence.  We had barely enough food for ourselves, some of it from the back garden, yet some misguided friend thought it would be clever to give us a kitten.  In retrospect, we should have refused, but it was a cute tangerine coloured little thing we named “Tango.”  We would spend pennies on tins of cheap catfood, but fortunately the elderly lady upstairs fell in love with it and supplemented its diet with more nutritious fare.

Then it produced kittens, as female cats do.  It must have been with a black tom, because the four little kittens found in the coal-shed featured one orange, one black, and two mottled orange and black.  We christened one of the mixed ones Mendel, in honour of the early geneticist.  One day Tango brought them one by one into the house, carrying each by the scruff of its tiny neck. When we took them out again, she brought them in again, so we set up a little pen for them in the hallway.

Fortunately we had just enough friends who lived in the surrounding country to find each one a good home, and the kindly neighbor asked if she could adopt Tango herself.  We breathed sighs of relief as the flat became cat-free once again.

It’s early doors yet

My grandmother, who brought up me and my sister from her mid-60s, had many peculiar expressions, some dating from her own childhood in Victorian England, and some from a nautical background.  Both her husband and her brother were sailors.  Where others might say, “By gosh!” or “Not on our life!” she would say “By the rock you perished on!”  She might have been misquoting the seafarers’ threat, “That’ll be the rock you’ll perish on.”

She would often say, “It’s early doors yet,” when she meant to indicate we were early, and we would patiently correct her to “It’s early days yet.”  We thought she had garbled the saying and was simply getting it wrong. 

I was an adult in my late 30s when I chanced upon the Garrick Arms, near to the Garrick Theatre in Garrick Street.  The pub’s walls were decorated with playbills from old theatre performances.  On one it said, “Doors open 7.00 pm, early doors 6.30 pm.”  Apparently, theatres would often open their doors early for a small extra charge, maybe 6d, for those wanting to secure a better seat.  The first recorded use was in 1883, a year after my grandmother was born.  She was not as daft as we’d thought.

Didn’t want Dyer to win

I took part in my first political campaign at the age of 10.  Clement Atlee’s Labour government called an election in 1950, defending a majority of over 150 seats.  Tired of deprivation and rationing, the people turned against the government, reducing its majority to a precarious 5 seats.  It struggled on for a time, then hoping to increase its majority, it called an election 20 months later. It lost to a Conservative majority of 17, one that returned Winston Churchill to power for a second term.

My role in 1950 was modest.  Like some other children I was placed outside a polling station with a placard atop a bamboo pole bearing a poster of Cyril Osborne, the Conservative candidate for Louth, in whose constituency we were located.  My grandmother was a lifelong Conservative.  We were told to greet voters going in to vote by occasionally singing the Tory song, “Vote, vote, vote for Mr Osborne, he’s the one to help the poor.”  More amusingly, since the local Labour candidate was called Frank Dyer, we were told to chant, “We don’t want Dyer ‘ere,” pronouncing it like diarrhoea.  Mr Osborne won locally, but the country had another 20 months of Labour government to run. 

At that age none of us had the slightest idea what the parties stood for.  It was more of a tribal thing of supporting our side against the other's.  It was great fun, however.

Cycling to Scunthorpe

I acquired my first bike a week after my 11th birthday when I started at Humberstone Foundation (grammar) School.  My legs were not very long at that stage, and it could be hard work, pedaling against a strong headwind.  In addition to the daily commute to and from school, my friends and I would often cycle into the countryside or along the foreshore for sightseeing pleasure trips. The roads were not as clogged with fast-moving cars as they are now, so this posed few dangers.

One day my sister and I decided to cycle unannounced the 30 miles to Scunthorpe, to visit my aunt and her family who lived there.  It was much further than any trip either of us had previously undertaken, but it was basically one main road all the way, not difficult to navigate.  It took us just over 3 hours, including a couple of refreshment stops along the way.  We arrived pretty exhausted at my aunt’s to be treated to chocolate ice-cream.  Meanwhile my aunt phoned a neighbour of my grandmother who lived a few houses away, and had one of the only private phones in the street, to report we were safe and well and would be spending the night at my aunt’s.  The next day my sister cycled back, while I was put on a train with my bicycle for the 1-hour return trip.

When the last train ran to St Andrews

When I first went to live in St Andrews, it had a railway station.  Mainline trains from England or Edinburgh would stop at Leuchars Junction, a few miles away, where one changed to the local service that ran between Dundee and St Andrews, stopping at Leuchars.  Leuchars itself was a bleak, windswept station, but at least had the interest of RAF fighters taking off and landing at the nearby air base.  From St Andrews itself there was also a local service that ran down the coast to pretty little fishing ports such as Anstruther, Crail and Pittenweem.

St Andrews station was closed in 1969, a casualty of the 1966 Tay Bridge to Dundee that dramatically cut its passenger numbers.  From then on, train passengers had to disembark at Leuchars and catch a bus or a taxi to St Andrews, as they still do.  When the very last train ran from Leuchars to St Andrews on the evening of 6th January 1969, a group of us went to Leuchars to be on it.  Professor Norman Gash and his wife Dorothy were by chance returning to St Andrews from the South, and joined us.  It was festive, with a guitarist playing “Last Train to San Fernando,” but substituting St Andrews instead.  The crew were mildly irritated when the communications cord was pulled three times on the journey to stop the train.

Wandering through the mists on oven days

Sometimes when we went to school in the morning, on foot to junior school, or on bicycles to grammar school, it would be foggy.  Humberston and Cleethorpes were on the coast, and sometimes sea mists would envelop the town.  Sometimes it would be fog, or a mixture of the two.  We would wrap up well because such days were usually cold and clammy.  On very rare occasions they were not, and we would step outside to find the day unnaturally warm, despite the mist.  With delight at the unexpected warmth, we referred to such days as “oven days” because it felt like stepping into a warm oven.

On oven days the mists were exceptionally thick, with visibility down to a few feet.  If one of us raced a few feet ahead, they disappeared from view.  The other unusual feature was the way they deadened sounds, giving them a dull, muffled feel.  It made crossing street corners quite hazardous, but fortunately such traffic as had ventured out crawled along slowly with all lights blazing.

I read they are probably advection mists, in which warm moist air flows over a cool surface, such as a cold sea, forming a thick mist that can then blow in from the sea.  I suppose it happened perhaps a couple of times per winter.  The rest of the foggy days were unpleasantly cold and damp, but the oven days were a positive pleasure.  It was quite exciting to make one’s way through such limited visibility without feeling uncomfortably cold.  We left bikes at home on such days and walked to school, thinking it too dangerous to be on the roads.

Playing a prank on CID Sid

My school’s deputy head, Mr Boot, was nicknamed Sid, not because of his name, but because he fancied himself as a detective, solving any school mysteries in the manner of the Criminal Investigation Department, the C.I.D. I played an elaborate practical joke, putting together a package containing an old wallet with a few foreign coins, a photo of a French pen-friend, several letters from firms selling optical equipment, all with the identifying address at the top removed, and a defunct fountain-pen amongst other items. There was nothing that could be identified. I left it on a school window ledge.

The package did the round of the classes, with people asked if they could identify any of the items. The chemistry teacher later told me that Mr Boot had laid all the items on the staff-room table in a bid to ascertain who owned them. Rather cheekily I asked the school caretaker if anyone had found such a package, only to be told that Mr Boot had asked to be told if anyone tried to claim it. I quickly assembled a similar package and took it to the caretaker telling him I had found my missing package. There the story ended, except that when the chemistry teacher laughingly asked if I’d had a hand in it, I shook my head and put on an innocent expression.

Catching the Carnoustie hovercraft

In the days when the service was running, I often caught the hovercraft across the English Channel to Boulogne. It had a huge rubber skirt that collapsed under it when it stopped on land. After passengers had boarded via gangway steps, huge fans would start, directing air downward to inflate the skirt. After the hovercraft had lifted itself up, the four fans would steer it into the water, gathering speed when it left Dover harbor.  The crossing took about 30 minutes, where ferry boats would take an hour and a quarter, sometimes longer.

The SR.N4 hovercraft used were very large, taking hundreds of passengers, and with cars stacked on the lower deck.  The ride was not as smooth as a ship's, and was much noisier, but it was always quite thrilling and never lost its novelty.

It was not very economic because, unlike with a ship, energy had to be expended in keeping it up.  I did take a satisfying ride in a smaller one when the British open golf championship was played in Carnoustie, quite a drive from St Andrews where I was staying.  I opted to return in a hovercraft laid on for the duration of the championship, and was deposited on the West Sands adjacent to the Royal and Ancient Club House some 15 minutes later.

Many years later I drove myself around an oval track in a one-person hovercraft.  It could only be steered by physically throwing my weight to either side of the cockpit, which was quite difficult, but I eventually mastered it.

Watching roads being surfaced

When I attended Reynolds Street junior school, I would walk to school with my sister or with friends, since it was only a few streets away.  Sometimes there would be road surfacing to entertain us on the way.  It involved a huge machine that enveloped part of the road with a metal cover to perhaps 6 inches off the ground.  Underneath were roaring flames that melted the tarmac covering over several square feet of road.  Workmen would follow to scrape it off while it was still warm and pliable, exposing the stone under-layer.

To children aged 8 or 9 this was a fascinating sight.  We’d stop and watch it for minutes, warming our hands in the heat its flames gave out, and thrilling to the roar of the burners inside.  We’d walk alongside it as it made its intermittent progress.  Behind it came another vehicle, this one with a cauldron of melted tar that would be poured over the exposed stone, and smoothed by workmen wielding long rods that had perpendicular metal strips at the end.  The technology must have changed, because I’ve never seen it done that way since then.

It made going to school more exciting, though it sometimes also made us perilously close to being late there because of the time it consumed on the way.

Remembering poems written in childhood

I wrote poems as a child, mostly when still at primary school, aged 9 or 10, and I still remember them all.  They were childish, of course, though in retrospect I suppose I had a good grasp of metre and rhyme.  Some of them were about childish things.  I no longer believed in Father Christmas, but I did write about him.

 I know a man in red and white

Who comes here every Christmas night

He brings the toys all in a sack,

But does it when we turn our back

 Jingle jingle goes the sleigh

The reindeer stop along the way

As every chimney he goes down

On his way about the town.

I had no theoretical knowledge of iambs and dactyls, but often I wrote in iambic tetrameter (di-dah di-dah di-dah di-dah).  Sometimes I used rhyming iambic pentameter, which many years later I learned to call heroic couplet.

Remembering some of my efforts, I am surprised at the complexity of some of my metres.  I wrote about a steam train when I was between 9 and 10 years old, when steam trains were the norm. 

 With a whistle and a puff and a bang, bang, bang

The express bell went clang, clang, clang.

The guard blew his whistle and waved his flag

And threw on the mail in a big black bag.

I note the triple alliteration at the end with "big black bag."  No-one taught me to do that, or how to use metre and rhyme.  I suppose I must have picked it up by reading other poems and listening to songs.

I was once made to recite my poems while my teacher, Miss Burgess, and the head teacher, Mary Balders, listened.  I covered my embarrassment by reciting them monotonously with no stress. 

I never really continued to write poetry, though I developed an abiding love of it.  As a teenager I wrote about the ruined cathedral at St Andrews.

We lightly stepped among the stones

Where now the grass and weeds have grown

Where once the great cathedral stood -

Man's timeless monument to God.

 The three tall spires alone remain -

Time's monument to man's insane

Destructive urge. We reached the spot

Where once the altar was and thought

Upon the folly of the race

That desecrated such a place.

And as a student I amused myself by writing a full-length comic verse play ("The Worms") in the style of Aristophanes.  But since then my enjoyment of poetry has been as a consumer of other people's work, rather than as a producer of my own.

Free neighbor-provided garden foods

In my impoverished days at St Andrews I shared a flat on Largo Road.  We had two ladies as neighbours, one retired and one about to.  Since neither of us had the skills or the inclination to tend the garden at the back, they took it over for us and grew vegetables.  Potatoes were the best.  They produced an unbelievable quantity.  Often when we had no food we'd dig up a few from the garden and eat fried sliced potatoes or oven-baked potato pie.

From time to time the two ladies would leave a bag of vegetables by the back door.  Occasionally there would be carrots, and even sometimes runner beans as well as potatoes.  Sometimes it was all we had to eat.  If we could afford a few scraps of stewing meat, they would make excellent stews.  Gradually I learned how to cook a few dishes.

There was rhubarb, masses of it at the back of the garden.  We made stewed rhubarb by the pot-full, leaving some in the pan for the next meals.  It was then we discovered what an excellent cleaning agent it was.  It must have been the oxalic acid, because it left the pans sparkling up to the point the rhubarb had filled.

We cooked rhubarb pies and entertained our friends with them.  At first I bought ready-made short-crust pastry and rolled it out to put a top crust on, but I soon taught myself to make pastry from flour and cheap margarine because it was a fraction of the cost of ready-made pastry, and I started making proper pies with a pastry bottom and top.  They were mostly rhubarb because it came free from our garden, but I extended my skills to gooseberries since they were a cheap buy, and occasionally to apples with cinnamon. 

My culinary skills evolved from necessity, but they have stayed with me and developed over the years, and still bring much pleasure and satisfaction. And I often think fondly of the two elderly ladies who helped us out.

Making beer and wine at university

There was not quite the drinking culture of today's universities, but my student days required drink and there was very little money.  The solution was that we often brewed our own beer and sometimes made our own wine.  From Boots we bought the brewing kits containing a big tin of malt, a packet of yeast and one of finings.  We added sugar and water to the malt, then gently started up some of the yeast in warm, sugared water.  When it frothed nicely we added it to the brewing mix.  We used a large plastic tub that had once held cheap sherry and had the advantage that it had a tap low down.

The mixture would brew for maybe ten days.  When the frothing had subsided it was ready to bottle for its secondary fermentation.  We begged a few crates of stone topped bottles from the local brewery that no longer used them.  The bottles were filled, and a spoonful of sugar added to each before sealing.  We found that a 3-inch triangle cut off the corner of an envelope, with a small cut across the tip, made a perfect funnel for getting the sugar into the bottle.

The secondary fermentation took a few more days, and then the beer was ready.  It had to be opened and poured very carefully because there was sediment at the bottom that could easily be disturbed.  We became quite good at pouring the beer and leaving about an inch and a half with sediment at the bottom.

The good part was using the sediment residue to fill another bottle.  It took about 5 of them to fill another one.  More sugar was added before it was sealed for a tertiary fermentation.  The beer we brewed was quite strong, but these residue-brewed ones were stronger still.

We graduated to home-brewed wines, and made a German-style one with our own printed labels identifying it as Weisser Ritter (White Knight).  It tasted quite sweet as it was maturing, so we added stuff to make it dry.  This was unfortunate.  When it did mature it was astringently dry, having developed its own dryness.  It was undrinkable as it was, so we made it into a very successful party punch.  The dryness was still so pronounced that one of our friends angrily accused us of putting neat alcohol into the punch.

I'd always wanted a gold Cadillac

I had been very poor as a student, often living from hand to mouth.  I supported myself by selling antique engravings, but it was a precarious living, with money sometimes coming in and sometimes not.  I left with a significant bank overdraft when I went to the United States with no money, no job and no prospects.  I surfed a friend's couch for many weeks, and eventually landed part-time work editing manuscripts ahead of publication.  I lived on salads, with boiled eggs and cheese as protein.

When I was appointed Professor of Philosophy at Hillsdale, I was bringing in a decent salary for the first time in my life.  Indeed, by UK standards it was positively handsome.  In general US salaries were higher and US prices lower, so standards of living were much higher.  There were things I wanted to do.

I wanted a yard of plastic, so I took out several credit cards, store cards and gas station cards, and had myself photographed with them on the steps of my house, alongside a tape measure to prove they came to over 36 inches.  I bought a gold Cadillac.  It was several years old and cost a few hundred dollars.  I used to joke that it reminded me of home, being about the size of the house I was brought up in.  It was a real gas-guzzler, doing about 16 miles to the American gallon, but since gas was about 70c a gallon in those innocent days, this hardly mattered.

One of the Hillsdale professors ran a small syndicate that invested in wildcat drilling for oil and gas, so I joined and invested at $500 a time in some speculative drilling.  Two of the drillings came good, so I owned shares in oil-wells that paid annual dividends.  I had myself photographed jumping for joy in front of a 'nodding donkey' oil-well.

There was one other thing I had resolved to do in my days of student poverty.  I went to the bank and drew out money in individual one-dollar bills, and had myself photographed taking a bath in money, before paying them all back in again. 

It was all a great deal of fun, and it emphasized just how much my life had changed in so short a time.  I still have the photographs put together in a display mount and framed.  It hangs on my wall and brings back memories whenever I scrutinize it.