I enjoyed a Rolling Stones concert at the optimal volume by opening the window when they played a mile from our house
✒I am so glad I didn't have tickets for the Rolling Stones concert. I have seen them twice, back in the days when you could get in for less than a week's wages, and the sound system was so loud you literally couldn't tell what song they were playing. The concert I enjoyed most was when they played the rugby stadium in Twickenham. We live a mile away, and so by opening the window in our son's bedroom we could hear the entire performance crisply and clearly, the distance bringing the decibels down to the perfect level.
✒At the weekend we went to see Michael Frayn speak about his farcical novel Skios, set on an imaginary Greek island. ("Though I have had people come up to me and say that they have had wonderful holidays there.") The mainspring of the story is a young chancer who arrives at Skios airport and, seeing the name of an academic on the placard held up by a taxi driver, decides to steal his identity (and cab). Frayn said that once you've established yourself as someone else, it's hard for the real person to reclaim themselves. For example, he'd heard about a Little Richard concert in which a member of the audience stood up and declared, "That is not Little Richard!" The man was thrown out, though later it emerged that a bent management had been franchising Little Richard lookalikes around the world.
It is so easy to be who you claim to be. Years ago I was meeting my family at Gatwick. I wanted to recreate a favourite Simpsons joke where Homer and Marge arrive at an airport and see a driver holding up a sign saying "Simpson".
"Look, Marge, there's a guy with the same name as us," says Homer. I held up a sign saying "Hoggart" and though I was dressed in jeans and a sweater, the other drivers assumed I was one of them, and brought me a stream of news about jams on the M25 and a burst water main in Croydon.
✒The death of Larry Hagman recalled how incredibly popular Dallas used to be, around the world. In Zimbabwe, a colleague and I gave a lift to a young white soldier, or "troopie", who was just back from Jo'berg, a place as exotic to him as Dallas itself to a Mexican peasant. He raved about the "divided highways" and the "TV that is in colour" and this amazing show called Dallas. Did we have Dallas in Britain? I said we did, and asked who he thought had shot JR. There was a stunned silence. "Somebody has shot JR?" he asked in horror. I realised that you could detect the age of a society not by when they invented the wheel but how far they had got in Dallas.
Years later, I was chatting with the man who invented the show, David Jacobs – no relation to our broadcaster. He told me the part had originally been intended for an actor called Robert Foxworth, who said he really didn't want to play a baddie in a long running series. Could they mitigate his character a little? The answer was no.
"JR believed that business was about screwing them before they screwed you, and he found the process exhilarating. So Robert passed. When Barbara Miller, the Lorimar casting director, suggested Larry Hagman, our first response was unenthusiastic. While we knew he was an excellent actor, he seemed soft to us. But when he came in the next day, he appeared in his shiny boots and Stetson and spoke pure Texas – his voice raised up an octave and using two or three times as many words than were necessary. He was JR on the spot."
✒Next year marks a largely forgotten but important anniversary. In 1913, for the first time, parliament took responsibility for preserving our finest buildings and archaeological sites. It seems quite incredible, but a hundred years ago Stonehenge was privately owned – by someone who didn't care for it and regarded it as a nuisance.
At first the new laws were regarded as an outrage by wealthy owners. But after a while, it became fashionable to bequeath your house, or a longbarrow on your land, to the nation because it demonstrated that you were both rich and generous.
✒Language changes: in its main headline this week, the Times described the new Canadian governor of the Bank of England as a "top outsider". The old Thunderer was not like this. You never saw, "Top outsider to marry king", or "Poland invaded by top outsider".
✒A website called the Middle Class Handbook has offered advice to its readers about Christmas round robin letters, and how to avoid inculcating total rage in the recipients. Much of their advice – don't brag about your children, for example – is sensible. Some of it isn't, such as the suggestion that you include small anecdotes "like the time you saw that chap from Gardeners' World in Waitrose". There is a happy medium between endless boasting and relaying an utterly trivial event from several months ago which merely implies that you don't have much of a life.
Nor do I agree that you should interleave the good news with the bad. "In March, we acquired a new puppy, Mr Snookums! In April, I regret to say that my mother died, after a long and painful illness, bravely born. But we cheered ourselves up in May with a never-to-be forgotten trip to the Galapagos islands!" Your letters are, this year as ever, very welcome.
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