Spectator peregrinations

I find it very hard to take seriously the calls for everlasting world peace made by Kenneth Rose's friend Emperor Hirohito and Prime Minister Takeo Miki to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the end of the war. 1 find it very hard to take Takeo Miki seriously. I once met Miki when he was Japanese foreign minister at a Seato conference in Canberra, nine years ago. I had been to a chamber music concert in Government House given by Lady Casey, wife of the Australian Governor-General, for the elite of Wagga Wagga and myself. Afterwards the mayor of Wagga thanked Her Excellency and the conductor for putting on a bloody good show, adding for good measure. "The mayoress and myself have had a really good blow-out." Leaving this unlikely scenario I found Lord Casey in the corridor talking to. an oriental luminary. "I see you went to the wrong school," Lord Casey said when he saw my tie which I only ever wore Down Under because I thought I was safe from such remarks. So naturally when he asked me if I had met the Japanese foreign minister Takeo Miki I thought he was taking the mickey. Was he invented by Gilbert and Sullivan or Monty Python?

Omniscience

Oil on the pitch is not the only surface problem to have interfered with the. result of a

Headingley Test match. Michael Melford, the Daily Telegraph cricket correspondent, wrote from Leeds on the day the latest Test started: "England have won three times here since the war, against Australia's twice, but England's three victories have been on occasions when the pitch was less than true. The last, of course, was in 1972 when fuserium had prepared the way for Underwood to take 10 for 82." Of course. He doesn't explain that the phantom cricketer, fuserium, is a grass disease. Cricket followers have to know everything these days — like the plight of East End cab-drivers.

Political maverick

Like most well-balanced folk I was appalled to see Humphry Berkeley trying to justify the wild gyrations of his maverick political career by saying in the Times that, at the age of forty-nine, he was still desperately searching for the approval of his father, Reginald, who would have been eighty-five last week had he not died prematurely of pneumonia forty years ago when Humphry was nine. Humphry's neighbours thought that the bailiff was his godfather even though his family was one of three that could trace its origins to well before the Norman conquest. So after being a Conservative MP he joined the Labo-Ur-Party infuriating people on both sides. But his father, all the while, was a Liberal. Which gives the

Liberals something to be thankful for. Someone else who can give thanks is the extremely neurotic child that might have been compelled to follow its father's example if Humphry had ever married. First lesson for the hapless youngster: how many `E's in Humphry Berkeley?

Theatres and skylines

1 am always impressed by the ingenuity of art galleries who can find a topical reason for holding any exhibition at any time at the drop of a hat. 'The Georgian Playhouse, Actors, Artists, Audiences and Architecture 1730-1830,' opened at the Hayward Gallery last Thursday — "the celebration of what could be the most important event in the British theatre since Burbage built the first public playhouse 399 years ago, the opening of the new National Theatre which faces the Hayward Gallery."

The British theatre is, I'm told, in the same state of upheavel now as it was in the time of Garrick. Good thinking. A major contribution comes from Somerset Maugham's 1948 gift of eighty Georgian theatre paintings to the National Theatre. Maugham wrote ,of them, "The theatres they build now are severely functional: you can see from all parts of them what is happening on the stage: the seats are comfortable and there are abundant exits, so that you run a small risk of being burned to death. But they are cold. They are apt to make you feel that you have come to the playhouse to undergo an ordeal rather than enjoy an entertainment. It seemed to me that my pictures in the foyer and on the stairs of a new theatre would a trifle mitigate the austerity of the architect's design." I don't think that, even with this prescience, Maugham could have envisaged the massive austerity of the South Bank concrete complex. By coincidence the

Spectator August 30, 1975

Hayward Gallery also opened a Palladio exhibition downstairs on the same day. Brilliantly constructed models of Palladian villas, but I wonder what Palladio, father of neo-classical architecture, would have made of the Hayward Gallery. One good thing about it was that there was an excellent view across the river towards St Paul's, England's most well-known Palladian offspring. Now now, however. That much-feted concrete slab, the National Theatre, has suddenly obliterated it.

Cannibalism

Despite my pompous strictures on gossipcolumn ethics, the dog-fight continues. Under the heading "Ex-dog bites dog horror," Nigel Dempster said in the Daily Mail that Tom Driberg was a sanctimonious old bore who had been denied the life peerage he might have expected. He was replying to an article in the 'Telegraph in which Driberg had said, "Mr Dempster I do not know: I think of him as a deeply unhappy man, lacerating his own heart with snickersnee jibes aimed at others," Next day Dempster wrote to the Telegraph, "The traditions of Fleet Street, certainly in the twelve years I have worked on two national newspapers, has always been `if you don't know, don't write'." Presumably Dempster knows Driberg, "the sanctimonious old bore," no better than Driberg knows Dempster. The question of Mr Driberg wanting a peerage was first mentioned in this column a few months ago, so maybe it's not so much a matter of dog eating dog as of Dempster eating the morsels that fall from Peregrine's table. My other recent plagiarists include the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Express and the BBC. And if that's not fame enough, the Buchan Observer and Peterhead Gazette in Aberdeenshire has reprinted a Peregrinations column in full. Brilliant cannibalism from an unexpected quarter.

Cloudy

Those brand-new curly clouds which have suddenly obscured the map of Britain on the BBC's weather charts and ended the heatwave are not such an innovation as we are led to believe. I see from my latest postcard from Cyril Ray, the thirteenth, that they are very similar to those executed by one Antonio Canale, better known as Canaletto, two centuries ago, in his English landscapes. After the clear blue skies of Venice he seems to have been as puzzled by British weather as the BBC weathermen. He wasn't much good at waves either.

Wild life

Shocking disclosures in this column that I have been shooting pigeons in Vincent Square seem to have triggered a reaction from my neighbour John Farr, the Tory MP, for Harborough in the Shires. He has written a long leader-page piece in the Daily Telegraph describing the best ways of dealing with these vermin. I think he particularly deplores the practice encouraged in the Tom Lehrer song, 'Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.' He also has some advice on killing grey squirrels so I think it would not be out of place here if I were to describe my own experiences in this area.

Finding that one of these animals had eaten my lunch, which I was going to eat in the sun, I bought one of those lobster pot like traps and baited it with more lunch. The squirrel had my lunch for breakfast several weeks later. After a life-and-death struggle in which I narrowly escaped minor injuries the yellow-fanged squirrel managed to convince me that I was not going to kill it or even release it in someone else's garden without resorting to below-the-belt tactics, so I tipped the whole cage into a rainwater barrel. After a minute of bubbling the squirrel with one bound was free and swam to the surface sitting on the edge of the barrel Houdini-style (when soaked, they look like rats) and after shaking nipped up the drain pipe. In future I'll be poisoning squirrels.

Egghead

Telly Savalas, better known as the telly cop Kojak and owner of the world's most famous bald head, was asked on a radio interview the other day how his personality was affected when he first had to shave his head for a film part. He said it didn't worry him at all: "I'm free of all feeling in that area." Is this what is known

a numb skull? Peregrine