When I’m feeling particularly unsuccessful, I console myself with all the luxury goods I don’t want. I was extremely consoled by the divorce of Christina Estrada, the former supermodel who’s just been awarded £75 million from her Saudi billionaire ex-husband. She’d actually wanted £196 million from Sheikh Walid Juffali.
Now I like money as much as the next man, and I certainly wouldn’t say no to £196 million, or even a paltry £75 million. But I would say no to most of the pointless things Estrada wanted to blow her money on. She asked for an annual £1 million for clothes, including £40,000 for fur coats, £109,000 for haute couture dresses and £21,000 for shoes – every year.
I really would be happy if I never had to walk into a clothes shop again. The same goes for the £495,000 Estrada demanded for five cars. What a relief when I gave up having a car in London and stuck to my bike – the time and irritation saved were worth their weight in haute couture dresses.
Of course, my feelings of superiority over poor Christina Estrada really amount to a sort of snobbery. By scoffing at her vanity, I’m actually saying that, if I had £75 million, I’d spend it in a more tasteful way – on a delightfully run-down rectory in Dorset, where I’d pad around in artfully scruffy clothes, admiring my Botticellis.
Newspaper editors are quite right to plaster their pages with pictures of Christina. The one thing we’re all interested in, to a lesser or greater extent, is money. Not all newspaper readers will be interested in, say, a pretty girl, the weather forecast or even Andy Murray’s supreme athleticism. But we all have to use money. And, so, we all look at £75 million with either curiosity, envy or, in my case, false indifference.
Professor James Campbell, considered the last of the old, eccentric Oxford dons, has just died, aged 81. The Worcester College historian was prone to putting his lit pipe in his pocket. Sadly, the rumour that he got round Worcester’s ban on cats by saying that his own cat, Frideswide, was a dog, turned out to be untrue.
In his 1982 magnum opus, The Anglo-Saxons, he argued that the Anglo-Saxons were much more sophisticated than previously thought, with their culture and institutions laying the ground for the Normans. With all due respect to Professor Campbell, I’m not sure I agreed with him this Sunday, when I bicycled around Northamptonshire churches with my old friend, the journalist Simon Scott Plummer.
I adored the late Saxon tower of Earls Barton, a great, chunky mass of stone rubble, wrapped in render. But, boy, it’s primitive. The tower is decorated with long strips of limestone, forming crude triangles, rectangles and squashed arches. The columns around the belfry look like fat, sausagey skittles.
There’s a theory that, if the Normans hadn’t turned up at the Battle of Hastings – which celebrates its 950th anniversary this year – Anglo-Saxon architecture would have got more sophisticated anyway. And, certainly, Edward the Confessor’s Westminster Abbey, built before the Norman Conquest, was a pretty advanced, Romanesque church, borrowing touches from Normandy.
But, as I lay in the graveyard in the sun, gazing at the Earls Barton tower, I remembered that Rome’s Pantheon had been built 800 years or more earlier. We may not have needed the Normans to do it but, either way, it took us a long time to catch up with the Romans.
Next week, a new exhibition opens on the lost Palace of Whitehall. Whitehall was, from 1530 to 1698, the main royal residence in London. With its 1,500 rooms, it was bigger than Versailles or the Vatican.
The new show takes in the palace’s surviving parts – Banqueting House and various fragments up and down Whitehall. Charles I stepped to his execution from a first-floor window in Banqueting House, wearing two shirts to stop him shivering in the cold and looking scared.
The show also tells the story of the first meeting between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, in the wine cellar where the Ministry of Defence now stands.
How funny that Whitehall is now used as shorthand to signify the dull, Byzantine workings of the senior civil service. It was once the pulsing heart of roistering, romantic, murderous, royal London.
Harry Mount’s Odyssey – Ancient Greece in the Footsteps of Odysseus (Bloomsbury) has just been published in paperback
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.