Anyone Know Who Bob Dylan Is?

I’ve just heard this story on Johnnie Walker-sitting-in-for-Terry Wogan. Ha ha ha!

Much as I enjoy the merry japes of Wogan and team I like Johnnie because he really loves the music he plays. He followed up the Dylan story with Like A Rolling Stone and shortly after played Waterloo Sunset, Turn, Turn, Turn and the theme from Test Match Special. For obvious reasons: Yay!!!

A Thatched Roof: Beverley Nichols

Since moving into a thatched cottage, I find I like reading about them, probably to reinforce the idea that I’ve done the right thing. An old favourite is A Thatched Roof by Beverley Nichols, the sequel to the best gardening book ever written: Down the Garden Path. Beverley Nichols was not only a prolific writer but what we would call today a celebrity. His phizog could be seen on advertisements telling the world that ‘If Beverley Nichols offered you a cigarette it would be a De Reszke.’ (There’s a famous story of Noël Coward saying, at a party given by the notoriously mean Godfrey Winn, ‘If Godfrey Winn offered you a cigarette, it would be a b-bloody m-miracle.’)



Nichols was a prolific writer; he said himself that he had a ‘fatal facility’. He gardened fanatically, played the piano to concert standard, adored cats. Astonishingly, and a sign of how celebrity culture has changed since those days, he managed for years to be doted on by women readers, including those of Woman’s Own, while drinking like a fish and carrying on a sex life which is hem hem too strong for my journal.

I’d like more people to enjoy his books so I’m recycling (sheer laziness) an article I wrote a long time ago ( about Beverley Nichols’ gardening books  )