Dear Philippa,

 

I am old enough to remember the time when AA and RAC rescue men went about by motorbike and sidecar, gave smart salutes to passing members, and didn’t have to declare their sexual orientation when applying for their jobs. This was also the time when well-upholstered women offered corset-fitting businesses from their homes, wig salesmen were viewed with as much suspicion as their customers, and there was a “surgical shop” in every town where mysterious and disgusting apparatus could be had. Trusses, I remember, were particularly fascinating and repellent to passing schoolboys, and universally misunderstood  by them to be devices designed to correct catastrophic distortion “down below”.

 

A golden age, then. I was set thinking about how things have changed when last weekend I referred to my daughter’s Penguin Encyclopedia to check a fact – or factoid as we now say. Having satisfied my need, I decided to roam about the pages to see what else I didn’t know, and I spotted Wayne Rooney’s name, the Spud-Faced Nipper of footballing fame. I was struck by the length of his entry – and this of course was written long before recent revelations about his social life and his employment difficulties - fifteen lines to be precise. I decided to do a bit of comparing. David Beckham had only twelve, the same as Blair and Thatcher, which is fair enough, but many distinguished figures fell well below Rooney’s allocation; Judy Dench ten lines, David Hockney six, Alexander Fleming six (but Penicillin five), Bill Gates ten, Vaughan Williams seven and North Yorkshire a mere seven. Even more shocking, no entry at all for Ian McKellen, nor for Maureen Lipman, a national treasure if ever there was one.

 

What were the editors thinking, I wonder. When I was a boy, pressing my nose against the windows of penny bun shops and (furtively) of purveyors of surgical appliances, our heroes were of a different stripe: Denis Compton, Baden Powell, Sterling Moss, Lonnie Donegan and Michael Ramsey are all good examples. Even footballers were respectable, doing nothing more outrageous than advertising Brilliantine. There was nothing said about them consuming illegal substances, consorting with ladies of the night and vomiting on the pavement outside clubs in Chelsea, though I seem to remember that one of them married the Beverley Sisters and became rather celebrated for it.

 

Values change. But is being useful briefly at the footie more meritorious than inventing Penicillin? I don’t think so. And I haven’t even mentioned Tommy Cooper.

 

Best wishes,

 

Howard