Do you ever have the feeling people are trying to avoid you?
It’s been happening to me this week. First, I went to the home of Anne of Cleves, in Lewes, East Sussex. She wasn’t in. Mind you, she must have been there recently. I spotted a hand sanitiser dispenser on a table when I peered through her window.
Henry VIII built the house for her 500 years ago, after deciding she wasn’t the dazzling beauty he expected from paintings he’d seen before they met. Cue an annulment.
‘If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.’ Anne kept hers. Other wives of Henry VIII didn’t
Those images were a kind of 16th century dating app, the forerunner of those websites where the photographs don’t quite match up to the real life person. We’ve seen it on Channel Four’s First Dates, when mouths droop as couples catch sight of each other for the first time.
Football managers could learn a thing or two from Kipling
With Anne nowhere to be found, I moved on to Rottingdean, along the coast from Brighton, to visit the gardens of Rudyard Kipling, author of The Jungle Book and The Man Who Would Be King. He also gave us one of the best poetic lines you’ll ever read: “If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster and treat those two imposters just the same.”
Football managers, particularly those who punch the air in triumph, often forget the meaning of it pretty quickly. One week, you’re on top of the world; the next, down in the dumps, but don’t allow either emotion to overwhelm you.
It’s from Kipling’s masterpiece, If, and it made me think of another line from that poem: “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you.” Anne kept hers. Other wives of Henry VIII didn’t.
But what would Hal have made of the Covid palaver surrounding the wearing of masks in public places? He might have laughed at the bizarre scenario of a passenger on my easyJet flight, pulling her mask up and down like a window blind in order to sip her coffee.
The non-eaters and drinkers, like me, were ordered to keep noses and mouths covered which made me wonder if the virus attacked only those who didn’t buy from the airline trolley.
Meanwhile, despite their bin men being on strike and the rubbish piling up, I liked the tagline of the city where I was based: “All things Brighton beautiful”. It’s a bit more catchy than the now forgotten: “Aberdeen City and Shire – a Brighter Outlook”. Don’t you think?