The Lighthouse

A watch on events

Kenneth Roy

When I went to see Charles Wheeler at his London flat, it came as no surprise that it was a somewhat bleak apartment, without comfort or adornment, and that its owner looked as if he had just received some extremely bad news. I liked him. He was world-weary, life-weary, and never deviated from his gentle, lugubrious countenance. He was much the same on television. He was not one of the gibbering phonies who make their way in that absurd world, trading on false bonhomie and matey intimacies, so bad at breakfast time that they make me want to throw a brick at the box. When Wheeler was asked if he was surprised that the spy Kim Philby had betrayed his country, he replied: 'Not really. I never really trusted him. He was the sort of fellow who smiled at breakfast.' Wherever you look on television, people are smiling at breakfast – grinning idiotically while perched as often as not on a sofa left over from one of Mike Leigh's plays about dodgy goings-on in suburbia. Wheeler would have been hopeless on breakfast television. He might also have struggled with the present expectation that politicians and political journalists, while affecting an air of confrontation on screen, are actually best buddies, attending the same parties. How the hacks love it. Wheeler mistrusted all politicians and refused to socialise with them. It was, then, the unhappiest fate that he was landed with Boris Johnson as his son-in-law. What he thought of Johnson, I dread to think. Well, I have an idea, but let us not speak ill of the living.

One of the few things of any interest to have happened while we were away for a fortnight (for a complete summary of the non-events of the first half of July, consult the Midgie) was the timely inclusion of the word drookit in the Oxford English Dictionary. If the word drookit did not exist to evoke the Scottish summer, someone would have had to invent it. Fortunately, someone did. I expect dreich preceded drookit into the dictionary. If not, these two soul-mates should be re-united as soon as practicable.

My opinion of the newsreader Trevor McDonald, never high, has improved recently with his admission that he drinks a bottle of wine a night and that consumption is at its peak when he returns home from a late-night presentation of the world's miseries. The news would drive anyone to the bottle, so why not the messenger? Despite his odd and slightly irritating habit of putting the emphasis on the wrong word, it seems that Sir Trevor is quite normal after all. The pro-health zealots were swift to disapprove, pointing out that a bottle is equivalent to nine units, more than any distinguished 68-year-old male should be permitted to imbibe in a single evening. Now, hang on. It was my understanding that a bottle of wine was the equivalent of six units, not a cirrhosis-inducing nine. When were the goal-posts changed, and why? I suspect it is all part of the general conspiracy to frighten the population, and that Sir Trevor McDonald should go on enjoying himself while there is still time.

I am leaving the lighthouse for a while. It is time others kept watch, starting with Barbara Millar next Friday. I will leave her a bottle of Merlot for company in this lonely place, on the strict understanding that it is intended to last the week of her residence. Fat chance.