✒As we near the 10th anniversary of 9/11, Anthony Seldon has published a new account of how Tony Blair received the news. He had to race back to London from Brighton, where he had binned his speech to the TUC, even though Downing Street had no possible defence against a similar attack. Special branch insisted that his party took the train, since his motorcade would have been obvious to an airborne terrorist.
As it happens, I was on that train, a few feet away from the PM's first-class compartment. We were delayed, waiting for him. I was sitting with John Sergeant and Adam Boulton, the Sky News political editor. Anji Hunter, Blair's senior aide, whom Boulton was later to marry, emerged on her way to the loo. We asked what she knew, and she said: "Nothing – we're listening to Radio 4, like everyone else." Had the PM got in touch with Bush? No, they hadn't the faintest idea where the president was.
"Well," said Boulton, "When he does talk to Bush, Blair should tell him not to do the first thing that comes into his head."
As we know, he failed. But as his car pulled away from the platform at Victoria I was rather impressed by Blair's courage.
✒Our cat, Willow, had to be put down this week. Frankly, no one I know has the faintest interest in other people's pets, unless they have stayed at their house and possibly had their leg humped by an enthusiastic dog. Dogs are demanding: they are in a perpetual state of wanting a walk, or food, or warning about the approach of a dangerous milkman.
Cats insert themselves more gently into family life. You become used to their morning miaow, their habit of silently jumping into someone's lap or snuggling on to your bed when they think you won't notice, the way they rub against you to say "feed me" or just "welcome back to my home". (As PG Wodehouse almost wrote, defining a hangover, "The door opened and a cat stamped into the room.")
Our vet offers a home-death service, so she died in my wife's arms, and is buried by the catnip in the garden she regarded as her personal estate. I don't expect anyone else, even our nearest, to care at all, but right now the hole in our family life seems gaping.
✒I had lunch with a friend this week who told me that there was a huge picture of a family we both know in the window of his local Budgens, in north London – four generations of them. "Do your shopping at Budgens!" it says, which is odd, since we know they usually shop at the next door Waitrose. There is also a picture of a local resident who appears in TV soaps with the same legend.
It is a cunning new idea, to get local people who may be recognised even by people who don't know them to add some cachet to a cheap supermarket. But perhaps it's not as clever as it looks. Whereas you might trust Jamie Oliver, whom you've never met, when he shills for Sainsbury's, you could easily think "Oh, those stuck-up Prendergasts from Artesian Road! They wouldn't be seen dead in Budgens!" Or, "That TV weatherman nicked my parking place last week – I'm off to Aldi."
✒I've followed the correspondence in this paper's Notes & Queries about the way how, in an otherwise deserted car park, a new arrival will park next to the only car present, as if to keep it company.
I can inform half our readers that exactly the opposite applies in gents toilets. It's one of those things your father never teaches you, but which you understand instinctively. It is so fixed that the American writer Dave Barry has produced charts showing exactly how it works.
You have to leave as much space between you and the other occupant or occupants as possible. So if it is a five urinal loo, and someone is using A, you must go to E. A third man arrives and he is obliged to use C. If a fourth chap comes in, he may well decide he doesn't want to use B or D, since that would mean standing next to someone, so he goes into a cubicle.
Why? Is it because nobody wants to be suspected of wanting to sneak a look? Or a fear of splashing? And while we're on the subject, why is going to the loo a social occasion for women? If I were in a pub, and said "I'm just off to the toilet," and someone else said, 'Oh, I'll come with you," he'd get some very puzzled looks.
✒I've been reading Anne Sebba's book about Mrs Simpson, That Woman. What intrigued me was the story of the forgotten woman, Mrs Freda Dudley Ward, who was Edward's mistress for 18 years, from the end of the first world war more or less until he met Wallis.
Like her, Freda was half American, a bossy, maternal woman married to a complaisant husband. Edward insisted that he could marry no one other than her, and threatened to kill himself if she left him. He also wrote to her in baby language, as he did to Mrs Simpson, and generally behaved like a spoiled adolescent, which was the pattern for his whole life.
Typically he left her a present, a topiary teddy bear standing outside the Georgian mansion in Sunbury-on-Thames where she lived with her husband. Bizarrely, the teddy bear is still there, visible from the river, rather straggly and overgrown by now, a lingering memory of a royal affair we have all largely forgotten.
✒ Labels: From Andrew Graystone, a bag of Maris Piper potatoes marked "suitable for vegetarians". Don Adie has a shaving stick which instructs him to "unscrew cap and push up bottom".
