On David Lean - a film giant

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of David Lean. This giant of the film world was responsible for some of the twentieth century's iconic movies. From working on Noel Coward's In Which We Serve and launching the screen acting career of Alec Guinness in the film version of the Dickens classic Great Expectations, Lean was at the forefront of a dazzling mileu of British talent that adorned the cinema in the post Second World War years. Not an easy man to work with he nontheless helped develop the careers of several distinguished actors, Peter O'Toole and Omar Shariff among them.

He was responsible for some true masterpieces, such as Lawrence of Arabia with the opening desert scene, Dr Zhivago and The Bridge on the River Kwai, with a mesemerising peformance by Alec Guinness as Colonel Nicholson. As for the cream of the acting talent, Lean worked with them all, from Richard Attenborough to Jack Hawkins and Julie Christie to John Mills and many, many more. A perfectionist who drove himself and others to the point of distraction, at times a tyrant, he was not an actor's director or a particularly caring man. He was, though, a great artist and a list of even some of his films is a roll-call of cimematic delights. Read and marvel: Great Expectations; Oliver Twist; Brief Encounter; The Bridge on the River Kwai; Hobson's Choice; Lawrence of Arabia; Dr Zhivago; Ryan's Daughter; Passage to India . Shall we see his like again?

The triumph of Sunday night television

The BBC would have pulled off a televisual coup if it develops the brilliant series shown on Easter Sunday night, The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency. Based on the book series by Alexander Mcall Smith and adapted by Richard Curtis (of Blackadder and Four Weddings& a Funeral and Vicar of Dibley fame) and the late and hugely missed Anthony Minghella, it is set in Botswana and tells the story of the abundant Precious Ramotswe of the eponymous title. Wonderfully photographed and brilliantly written, it is a 'feel good factor' series if ever there was one, with combining warm African wit with profound messages, all shot on location with fabulous colours. Last night's episode was dedicated to Anthony Minghella (the English Patient, The Talented Mr Ripley and Cold Mountain to name just a few) who died suddenly last week at the achingly young age of 54. The world has lost two of its brightest in the firmament in the space of a week - Anthony Minghella and Paul Scofield. RIP artistic souls both.

A theatrical light goes out and another burns brighter still

The British theatre has lost one of its great figures - Paul Scofield. Famous for his role on the stage, and later screen, as Sir Thomas More in Robert Bolts's play A Man for All Seasons he was a Shakespearian classical actor of great power and presence. Choosing to remain in the theatre when Hollywood stardom beckoned, he was a modest and sel-effacing man - as his co-star in Peter Shaffer's play Amadeus, Simon Callow, said of him Schofield was not an 'actorly' actor. Having lived through the great days of the theatre in the mid-20th century, Scofield ranks alongside Olivier, Gielgud, and Guinness as masters of the art.

Another contemporary master of the art can be seen at the National Theatre in London playing Benedict in Much Ado About Nothing, Simon Russell Beale. In a truly magnificent performance, playing opposite Zoe Wanamaker as Beatrice, this most celebratory of Shakespeare's comedies is brought to vivid life. Both actors are at the top of their profession and a the top of their game. The cast is wonderful with the likes of Oliver Ford Davies lending his great experience on stage and screen in the role of Beatrice's father, Leonato. Directed with bravura by the brilliantissimo Stephen Hyntner the action is aided and guided by a revolving stage and there is a fabulously conceived, wonderfully funny and perfectly executed piece of stage business involving a sunken bath and the antics of the two warring principals.

It is every bit as exuberant and bouncy a production as Kenneth Branagh's film version set in the Italian countryside and boasting an all-star cast. As they say in the theatrical reviewing world: beg, borrow or steal a ticket.

A broken window in Adelaide

As well as the excitement of the finale of the Six Nations rugby football tournament, made all the more sweet by the victory of Wales as champions and winners of the Grand Slam, the Australian Grand Prix in Melbourne is playing out its drama as I write. Melbourne is Australia's 'second city' but it has not always played host to the Grand Prx. For many years the South Australian city of Adelaide gave itself over to the thrills, excitement and glamour of motor sport. Another memory springs to mind.....

In the year of grace 1991, as the long premiership of Mrs Thatcher was coming to an end, marking the close of the decade that would become to be known by the short-hand of ‘the 80s’, and what was to become the shorter but turbulent early 1990s under one John Major was just beginning, the Oldest Trainee journeyed to the other side of the world. At that time it was popular for gap-year students – between school and university or further/higher education – to take time to work and travel and in the Oldest Trainee's case it was mid-degree course and it was travelling to the Southern hemisphere. Due to a combination of academic exhaustion, an understanding university tutor and a suggestable nature, it was South Australia that became the focus of travelling attention . . Suffice it to say, he found a way through the good offices of a sympathetic tutor at the University to persuade the academic authorities to grant him leave of absence for a year – a suspension of studies – in order to take time out from the ‘treadmill’ of study followed for many a year since the age of 4. A friend of the family who had attended Cambridge University in the 1950s with the pater familias of the Legoe family and had subsequently gone out to Australia to live and work for a while, suggested both a visit Down Under and a sojourn with his old friend’s family.

It is not a highly recommended technique to endear oneself to your hosts, but launching oneself through the glass door of the host family on the first night of arrival is exactly what this writer did on his arrival in the city of Adelaide. Having been kind enough to respond to a telephonic entreaty from the airport to pick up the friend of a friend and having furthered that generosity by putting that stranger up for the night, these blameless citizens of the South Australian capital found themselves dealing with a long-haul traveller who leapt through glass doors. He had chosen the family, or rather the family had been unlucky enough to be landed with him by virtue of their names being on a contacts list provided by a family friend (of the Oldest Trainee) who seeded the idea of the Great Australian adventure in the first place.

Thus it came to pass that on a balmy weekend evening in the first flowering of a Southern Hemisphere summer, having left the Autumn in the Northern Hemisphere, the Oldest Trainee found himself in the garden Jacuzzi under an Australian sky in the city of Adelaide. Having been reassured by the host father that he, the father, had not claimed on the house insurance for a while and warned by the host mother not to presume or expect help from anyone just because of the fact of friendship long ago between one family and another, he started his Australian sojourn.

After that window-shattering experience in the capital city of the free-settled state of South Australia – a distinction the burghers of its capital city and across the state never cease to point out, giving South Australia an Anglicised flavour of a certain kind, it was into the hands of the Legoe family of Adelaide and Robe and South east South Australia that he was passed before he could do much more damage.

In the year of his visit, the Australian Grand Prix was still being held in Adelaide. En route to meet George Legoe, eldest son of gentlemen farmers and as near-landed gentry of the South Australian state as it gets, the father of that most forebearing of host families showed him the sights of the city in preparation for the Grand Prix by driving the route that the drivers would race: at that time Adelaide shared with Monaco the distinction of being host to a motor race actually raced within the city itself – Melbourne was to steal the Formula 1 crown from Adelaide, but at that time the South Australian capital was Queen of the Australian motor racing world. It turned out that the Oldest Trainee was to be present at the race which was run in a sustained downpour of rain and viewed from an office block near the track.

The handover of the troublesome visitor to George Legoe having taken place outside the city limits, the journey continued southwards towards Robe in the south-east of the state. George was taciturn but friendly and he indulged the Oldest Trainee's stream of questions.

The Legoe family have major connections with Adelaide, as do half the farmers and land-owners of the state. George’s mother Marianne was from a family connected to the founder of the city and the state itself. Adelaide was named after Queen Adelaide. As was the case with many farming families, the Legoes had a house in the city and his younger brother Will attended one of the Universities in Adelaide (Flinders). The traffic from Robe to Adelaide was frequent and an unremarked feature of their lives: the family networks had friends whose children studied in the city at university or had attended as pupils one of the various boarding schools modelled on the English system. The Legoes themselves had a school link with Geelong in Victoria. All in all Adelaide was the nearest major city and in Australian terms, up the road in journey time: three hours. A country town and a small city, three hours apart, not a problem for citizens of this island continent.

On rugby, Ireland, Oscar Wilde and wheelchairs

This weekend marks the closing of this year's playing of the rugby tournament known across the northern hemisphere as the Six Nations championship. In times gone by the championship was known as the 'Five Nations' and consisted of the home nations of the United Kingdom - England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales - plus France (the auld enemy from England's viewpoint or the auld ally from Scotland's). With the arrival of Italy on the rugby-playing scene the tournament opened its doors to its sixth member. Those of us from Wales had a special reason to welcome the Italians, for it is said that the Welsh are 'Italians in the rain'. As if to prove the point, not long ago the Welsh squad boasted a Sidoli, a scion of an ex-patriot Italian family business dedicated to the fine art of making ice cream - Sidoli's are the toast of South Wales to this day.

Last weekend's rugby clash between Wales and Ireland brought back memories of a trp to Dublin in support of Wales against Ireland. If I close my eyes and think hard I will conjure up the scene:

It is not immediately apparent that road travel and the European Union are linked until you travel across Ireland by road. The emerald isle is known for its enthusiastic embrace of all things European and not least because of the opportunity to fund all sorts of projects that membership provides, road-building among them. But with an Irish twist, of course. The story has it that each county in the Republic, large or small, had to have the same allocation of money to put into the highway. This in turn meant that once the fund per county ran dry, so did the tarmacadam. Subsequently there are stretches of road in and between counties that rival the art of the French auto-routes at their best which suddenly come to an end, giving way to the worthy but altogether less magisterial efforts of the local authority. The super-highway trail is once more taken up a few miles further along in the next county.

This observation seemed all the more pertinent at the time of crossing these motor trails for it was on the occasion of the announcement of the death of the much-loved former Irish Prime Minister or Tasoieach, Jack Lynch. As well-regarded for his sporting prowess on hurling and Gaelic football field as in the public arena, it was Jack Lynch who negotiated Ireland’s entry into the European Union, then known as the European Economic Community (EEC). At the time of making the journey, from Galway to Dublin and back, the name Jack Lynch was not a familiar one, although I counted myself as a student of history and politics and of European affairs. Through newspaper coverage and the familiar tones of the BBC correspondent John Simpson on Irish radio I learned of how this sporting political hero was almost airbrushed out, removed from of the annals of Irish political history , through the machinations of subsequent political manoeuvrings.

A view of Jack Lynch as honourable man sketched out in the obituaries was echoed in the confines of the poor Claire convent in Galway by those well-informed nuns whose knowledge of the outside world seems to deepen as a result of their silent contemplative life. “ A good man, was Jack Lynch” they concurred, sitting behind a grille in the reception room, during the audience granted to me as a result of my involvement in conveying a wheelchair-bound friend, formerly of the convent ,to visit them.

The European theme continued in Dublin, with the crane-filled skyline paying witness to the building boom that came in the wake of Irish membership of the European single currency. Obligatory visits to some of the ‘must-see’ Dublin sites: the public sculpture of Molly Malone (otherwise known as ‘the tart with the cart’) as well as the water-monument, popularly referred to as the ‘floozy in the jacuzzi’; the rather moving memorial monument to Oscar Wilde inscribed with one of his greatest aphorisms: “ all of us are lying in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars”.

This tribute to human exuberance links to another Dublin trip and accompanying another wheelchair-user – this time for the ‘rugby and the crack’ – Ireland and Wales. During that festival known as the Six Nations rugby tournament, when Ireland play Wales at home, Dublin becomes a party city. From the rugby stadium known by its shorthand label of ‘Lansdowne Road’ through to late night scenes of comic alcohol-fuelled festival mayhem in Grafton Street and the Shelbourne Hotel on St Stephens Green. The experience of acting as navigator and guardian to a man determined to demonstrate he is making the most of his weekend by launching himself out of his chair at the smallest opportunity, is something of an eye-opener. It seemed to me the on-pitch action was safer. This rocket-propulsion enabled the jumping of taxi queues, much to the apparent consternation of fellow revellers – I will never know whether the arm-waving was in celebration of our leaving the scene or anger at our stealing of the ride home. However, the joviality and inevitable hangover was soon dispelled by an early morning phone call bringing news of the death of my companion’s stepfather, felled by a heart attack.

The journey back to Cardiff was thoughtfully sombre, the atmosphere leavened by (rugby) talk of the weekend with Welsh rugby officials we sat with in the plane – those men in jacket and ties known as the ‘blazerati’. As for the rugby, there’s always the next game, the next trip, another opportunity to stare at the stars whilst lying in the gutter. Jack Lynch would have appreciated the scene as would my friend’s stepfather, Colin. Together, of course, with Oscar Wilde and those well-informed sisters of the poor Claire convent.

Kenya days

My collected diaries tell me that almost exactly ten years ago I was in Kenya visiting my uncle, who was in the last few months of his life. Uncle Ted was married to my late Scottish maternal grandfather's sister. A life-long vegetarian he was the eldest of a large Quaker family who moved out to East Africa in the early decades of the 20th century. Ted's mother was a remarkable woman who kept the family going, and as the eldest he supported his siblings by working on a farm in Tanzania (then Tanganika). He eventually farmed coffee near Nairobi and was a pillar of the Museum and a keen tennis player. A pacifist by conviction, he served as an ambulance driver on the East African front during the Second World War and during the Mau Mau emergency slept with a gun under his pillow to protect his estate workers from the guerillas who were waging a terror campaign against farm workers. A very gentle man, his wife, my great aunt Marjorie was quite a tour de force. A teacher at the Agha Khan school in Nairobi, she never seemed to like children and perhaps was as frigtened of them as they were of her. Throughout their long marriage and well into Marjorie's declining years - she was older than Ted and died before him - theirs was a relationship based on trust, tolerance and good humour. So often, when a controversial topic came up and Marjorie was holding forth, whether on children, family or their long-serving cook NuHu, Ted would become increasingly exasperated and suddenly exclaim " O Marjorie! ". In that phrase lay a universe of meaning and comment.

Having no children of their own, Ted and Marjorie followed the fortunes of their assorted nephews and nieces, and succeeding generations. There was something of a tradition in my mother's family to go out to Africa to stay with Uncle Ted and Auntie Marjorie during the Summer of leaving school, before going to University. My mother and her two sisters both made the journey as did I many years later. The African summer was a defining moment in one's life up until then and to have that connection was magnificent indeed. Experiencing the extraordinariness of Africa as a callow youth of 18 for the first time is to enter a different world. Ten years later the magic was just as strong.

Over many years Ted and Marjorie's farm in Nairobi became a place to which friends and family retuned time and again, and was also the scene of an Out Of Africa-style love story between cousins: one a young RAF officer and the other a 17 year old fresh from school.

So it was with great concern that I have followed the events in Kenya these last months and hope and pray that the settlement mediated by Kofi Annan will hold and real political change will happen. Kenya has not in the past been a crucible of trible violence, but once those forces are unleashed they can be very difficult to control. Ten years ago the talk was of the then incumbent President, Daniel arap Moi, being up to his neck in the usual corruption and Richard Leakey, who was credited with saving the Kenyan wildlife industry, was active on the political stage developing a credible opposition to the ruling party. They were balmy days indeed compared with the appalling scenes these last months. The legacy of post-Colonial Africa has too often been one of the 'big man' presiding over a corrupt regime. Let us hope that Kenya moves out of the shadow of the big man into a properly functioning multi-party state as soon as possible and Kenyans once more return to the ideal that they are Kenyans every bit as much as tribal affiliations of Kikuyu or Kalendrin

The blog begins

These are the jottings, writings, thoughts and comments of the Oldest Trainee. They will encompass history, politics, public affairs, education and the arts, all of which are dear to my heart, as well as matters philosophical. The Oldest Trainees has been educated for life if not a career. As one of the greatest playwrights of the English language, Oscar Wilde, once commented - " education is an admirable thing but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught ". How true that is. Would that our illustrious Chancellor and his esteemed cohorts bear that in mind on this the Budget day in the UK - for those watching outside the UK the Chancellor is the government's chief finance minister.

More on these themes anon