Month: March 2019

What’s so special about today, I hear you ask. Well, look at the calendar, check the date, and then you’ll know.

For today is 8 March, the official No Wife Beating Day in Russia, which for no persuasive reason we too have begun to celebrate.

First we had Mothering Sunday, a religious holiday Western Christians celebrate on the fourth Sunday of Lent.

Yet, as progress advanced, our delicate sensibilities could no longer accommodate any Christian festivals other than Christmas Shopping (just 292 days left, I’ll have you know).

Hence, under the cool influence of the US, Mothering Sunday was largely replaced by Mother’s Day, a holiday with no religious overtones whatsoever.

Now that secular but otherwise unobjectionable holiday has been supplemented by International Women’s Day (IWD), celebrated by all progressive mankind on 8 March. Our delicate sensibilities aren’t offended at all.

Actually, though the portion of mankind that celebrates 8 March calls itself progressive, it isn’t really entitled to this modifier – unless one accepts a propensity for murdering millions as an essential aspect of progress.

For 8 March is a communist event, declared a national holiday by the Bolsheviks in 1917, immediately after they seized power and started killing people on a scale never before seen in history. A few wires were expertly pulled after the war, and IWD also got enshrined in Soviet satellites.

Outside the Soviet bloc, 8 March went uncelebrated, unrecognised and, until recently, unknown. I remember back in 1974, when I worked at NASA, visiting Soviet astronauts made a big show of wishing female American employees a happy 8 March, eliciting only the stock Texan response of “Say what?”

The event was big in the Soviet Union, with millions of men giving millions of women bunches of mimosa, boxes of chocolates, bottles of scent – and, more important, refraining from giving them a black eye, a practice rather more widespread in Russia than in the West.

But not on 8 March. That was the day when men scoured their conscience clean by being effusively lovey-dovey – so that they could resume abusing women the very next day.

For Russia was then, and still remains, out of reach for fashionable ideas about women’s equality or indeed humanity. As the Russian proverb goes, “A chicken isn’t a bird, a wench isn’t a person.”

Much as one may be derisory about feminism, it’s hard to justify the antediluvian abuse, often physical, that’s par for the course in Russia, especially outside central Moscow or Petersburg. Proponents of the plus ça change view of history would be well-advised to read Dostoyevsky on this subject.

In A Writer’s Diary Dostoyevsky describes in terrifying detail the characteristic savagery of a peasant taking a belt or a stick to his trussed-up wife, lashing at her, ignoring her pleas for mercy until, pounded into a bloody pulp, she stops pleading or indeed moving. However, according to the patriotic writer, this in no way contradicted the brute’s inner spirituality, so superior to Western materialistic legalism.

(A senior Russian official recently put that artistic insight on a scientific footing by explaining that the Russians possess an extra gene of spirituality.)

The Russian village still has the same roads (typically none) as at the time that was written, and the same way of treating womenfolk – but not on 8 March. On that day the Soviets were house-trained to express their solidarity with the oppressed women of the world, or rather specifically of the capitalist world.

As a conservative, I have my cockles warmed by the traditionalist way in which the Russians lovingly maintain Soviet traditions, including the odd bit of murder by the state, albeit so far on a smaller scale. Why we have adopted some of them, at a time when communism has supposedly collapsed, is rather harder to explain.

But why stop here? Many Britons, especially those of the Labour persuasion, already celebrate May Day, with red flags flying to symbolise the workers’ blood spilled by ghastly capitalists. Why not spread the festivities more widely?

The Russians also celebrate 7 November, on which day in 1917 the Bolsheviks introduced social justice expressed in mass murder and universal slavery.

I say we’ve been ignoring this glorious event far too long, even though it’s now coyly called Reconciliation and Agreement Day. And neither do we celebrate Red Army Day on 23 February – another shameful omission.

But at least we seem to be warming up to 8 March, an important communist event. At least we’re moving in the right direction.

In case you plan to accelerate down that road, here are some unmissable dates for your calendar. Lenin was born on 22 April, Stalin on 18 December, the Soviet Union was formed on 30 December.

And today, on 8 March, Penelope has nothing to fear from me.

Back in the old days, the mother of our Queen knew how to handle royals who brought the monarchy into disrepute.

She twisted the government’s arm into packing the Duke of Windsor (formerly King Edward VIII) off to France and, after the war started, to the sinecure post of governor of the Bahamas.

The Duke thus lost three things because of his twice-divorced American wife: first his throne, then his manhood, and then his country. He got in trouble by flouting his duty as king and head of the state church, and then by expressing pro-Nazi sympathies.

His highly objectionable wife was the principal dynamic in the duke’s downfall, which ought to have taught a valuable lesson to the subsequent generations of the royal family.

A lesson was indeed taught but, judging by the latest shenanigans of the Harry & Meghan travelling circus, it hasn’t been heeded.

Though they haven’t yet declared support for Britain’s foreign enemies, arguably they’re causing as much damage by mouthing a never-ending torrent of New Age twaddle, with Meghan by all accounts acting as the active agent (and Harry’s speech writer).

At least the subversive cause championed by Wallis could be defeated by air raids and tank thrusts. But how do you counter the subversive campaign inspired by Meghan?

The campaign is being conducted on all fronts. Last week, Meghan and Harry announced that they would raise their child ‘gender neutral’, that is without imposing any male or female stereotypes on the poor tot.

According to Meghan, they’d practise a ‘fluid approach’, whatever that means. Actually, what does it mean?

‘Progressive’ parents used to make similarly inane statements about their children’s religious education. They claimed they’d keep the slate clean to let the children make their own choice when they grew up.

That was tantamount to forfeiting parental responsibility and almost guaranteeing that the child would opt for atheism. But, lamentable though such parental lassitude might have been, at least there was nothing degenerate about it.

Are we to understand that Meghan and Harry are going to let their child make a similar choice about his or her sex? If so, this is indeed a degenerate perversion teetering at the outer edge of New Age nonsense.

A child’s sex isn’t a matter of free choice, contrary to the lunatic propaganda in leftie circles. It’s a matter of chromosomal composition: XY is male; XX female. This is a physiological imperative, not a social construct.

Thus a boy should be taught what it is to be a man, and a girl what it is to be a woman. It’s more productive to work with physiology, rather than against it.

Harry should have been trained from birth, and Meghan should have realised by now, that they belong to a unique family, one in which children to a large extent belong to the whole nation, not just to their parents.

If Meghan wanted to have an unchallenged sway over her offspring’s upbringing, she should have produced children with her previous husband or one of her lovers.

In this case, physiology will probably trump ideology in that the child, no matter how fluid Meghan’s approach will be, is likely to be either a boy or a girl, rather than neither or an eerie mix of the two.

The real damage is different: it’s in members of our reigning dynasty fostering notions that undermine the dynasty and hence the whole constitutional dispensation. For a monarchy is by definition a conservative institution – or it is nothing.

Divested of any real executive power, it still performs a vital role, that of the adhesive bonding Britain together both horizontally, at present, and vertically, slotting today’s nation into the historical continuum of the generations past, present and future.

That’s why the trendy hare-brained platitudes spouted by Meghan are so detrimental: they rob the dynasty of its dignity and its umbilical links with the nation’s past.

This former Hollywood starlet, as feeble of mind as she’s strong of character, is effectively acting as ventriloquist to Harry’s dummy. Just like his henpecked great-great uncle, Harry dutifully enunciates the words put into his mouth by his domineering American wife.

The other day he made a speech to mark We Day, which encourages pimply youths to campaign for social issues. Rarely does one hear a speech in which the orator speaks so much and says so little.

First, Harry congratulated the youngsters on being “the most engaged generation in history”. Engaged in what exactly? Queueing up at recruitment offices and dying for their country, as the young men and women did at the time Wallis and her husband saw nothing wrong with Hitler?

No, of course not. Today’s youths are engaged in screaming the same platitudes Harry and Meghan favour, imposing fascist-style censorship on academic life, campaigning for every faddish cause coming round the block, cutting off (or sewing on) their vital bits on a whim, covering themselves with ‘body art’, getting all their education from smartphones.

If this is engagement, give me detachment any sweet day.

The mainstream media, explained Harry, are guilty of “distorting the truth” and “trying to manipulate the power of positive thinking”. I’d have to agree with this assessment, provided I agree with Harry’s (or rather Meghan’s) take on positive thinking.

Or, come to that, thinking in general. This cerebral exertion must by no means be confused with delivering a staccato of New Age slogans, a confusion that has manifestly and lamentably taken over Harry’s mind:

“Be braver. Be stronger. Be kind to each other. Be kind to yourselves. Have less screen time and more face-to-face time. Exceed expectations. Eliminate plastics. Conserve water. Protect wildlife and their unique habitat. Keep empathy alive. Ask your friends how they are doing and listen to the answer. Be honest. Take risks. Change your thoughts and change the world. Dare to be the greatest generation of all time.”

And what should be the impelling desideratum of the greatest generation of all time? “Every forest, every river, every ocean, every coastline, every insect, every wild animal. Every blade of grass, every ray of sun and every rain drop is crucial to our survival.”

Not belonging to the greatest generation, I’d like to know if I’m still allowed to mow my lawn (or rather have it mown, if truth be told). After all, that procedure puts paid to countless blades of grass.

Also, I’d like to know how I could protect “every ray of sun and every drop of rain”. Do I have first to die and then rise on the third day, or can I still serve the greatest generation of all time even in the absence of divine powers?

And finally, “As my wife often reminds me with one of her favourite quotes by Martin Luther King Jr, ‘Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that’.”

At least MLK evangelised some obscure form of Christianity. Harry and his wife are evangelising the secular cult pretending to fill the spiritual and cultural vacuum formed by our aggressively anti-Christian modernity.

However, if they’re running out of clichés, I may offer a few that are known to work miracles on youngsters. How about “the youth is the barometer of the nation”? That’s a more interesting way of flattering prepubescent audiences, and Trotsky was indeed an effective orator.

This brings me back to the question of the title. If that vacancy comes up, I do hope Her Majesty will fill it with Harry and his Wallis Mark II. Before it’s too late.

Knife crime is in sharp focus, as it were, with 279 people stabbed to death last year.

Applying the standard wartime ratio of three wounded to one KIA, the total number of stabbings must have been at least a thousand.

Hence the pile of newspaper pages devoted to the problem, with words like ‘crisis’ and ‘pandemic’ bandied about, complete with superlative adjectives. Most commentators regard the problem as difficult, if not impossible to solve.

So it is – within the confines of the ‘liberal’ bilge that now functions as a surrogate theocratic religion. (I often put the word liberal in quotes because its most common usage actually means ‘illiberal’.) Dropping those shackles, however, would put an end to routine knife crime in short order.

Much of the problem is due to Mrs May’s tenure as incompetent home secretary, from which she naturally graduated to her present position of incompetent prime minister. Acting in her previous capacity, she practically withdrew the power of stop and search from the police.

This was done in the name of multi-culti ‘fairness’ (this word too means its opposite the way it’s commonly used). For, supposedly driven by their febrile racial hatred, policemen were stopping and searching mostly non-whites.

How unfair was that? If they stopped a black youth sporting a hoodie and a feral scowl, they were duty-bound to search, say, my wife who looks, speaks and dresses like a prettier version of Princess Anne.

Since we can’t afford many cops on the beat, the conclusion made itself: if it was impossible to stop and search everyone, the police should stop and search no one. Even putative racism is a crime much worse than slitting someone’s throat.

Those dissenters against the ‘liberal’ ethos point out that the police have to act on the balance of probability. This isn’t hard to calculate, considering that two thirds of knife-possession offenders under 25 in London are non-white (38 per cent nationally).

But statistics shouldn’t affect principles, and Mrs May stuck to her guns and, evidently, knives. As a result, we’re regaled every day with gruesome stories about this or that 17-year-old A-pupil stabbed to death, for no apparent reason.

Have you noticed how the victim of every murder receiving national attention is an upstanding pillar of society boasting high academic achievement, sunny disposition and universal love?

One is almost compelled to infer that cutting the throat of a ne’er-do-well would somehow be less objectionable. Now I don’t care about the personality of the victim – every human life is equally valuable, and the wanton taking of it equally reprehensible.

It’s the personalities of the murderers that interest me, or especially how they are described. For example, in his sensible, if slightly self-serving, article, Boris Johnson refers to his success as mayor of London in promoting stop and search powers of the police.

As a result, he writes, knife crime went down, and I have no reason to doubt his claim. What I find actively irritating is his non-stop referring to knife-wielders as ‘kids’.

I’ve always been under the impression that, to produce a kid on this side of the Atlantic, one has to have sex with a goat. Though experimental attempts are doubtless made all over the countryside, none of these unions has so far been blessed with offspring – unless of course Jeremy Corbyn is lying about his ancestry.

Mr Johnson, educated at Eton and Oxford, knows this as well as I do, and I bet he never refers to his own children as ‘kids’ in private. He does so in public because he wants to come across as ‘cool’, probably to offset that Eton and Oxford bit.

But he must realise that the same desire to appear ‘cool’ takes ghetto youngsters into less innocuous areas, those in which consuming and selling drugs is as cool as carrying and using a knife.

Youth gangs are overrunning vast tracts of urban real estate, and many use random killings as initiation rites. But even those that don’t still attract countless youths who are evil by nature and have no social, cultural or religious counterweight to their evil.

However, the whole ‘liberal’ ethos, and the justice system as its subset, is based on the a priori assumption that no one is innately evil.

This goes back to Rousseau, with his arrant nonsense about every person being by nature a noble sauvage impeccable in his primordial virtue. And if some people demonstrably act in a less than impeccable manner, they are victims of correctable social conditions.

What I describe as arrant nonsense is to our powers-that-be a sort of secular scripture, with no heresy or apostasy permitted or tolerated. Hence the derisory sentences for criminals caught with knives in their possession – or for criminals in general.

The prevailing article of faith is that all of them can be rehabilitated by having their heads pumped full of New Age inanities. Ideally, this should be done not in prison but ‘in the community’, whose safety is thereby sacrificed at the altar of the new cult.

That’s why the death penalty has become unthinkable everywhere in Europe: it’s seen as what it isn’t, the denial of the sanctity of human life, rather than what it is, the assertion of that very sanctity.

By imposing the death penalty a society communicates with resolute finality that each human life is so sacred that no length of prison sentence can redeem its arbitrary taking. The secondary message is that some people are so evil that they can’t be redeemed, in this world at any rate.

You understand, of course, that I have in mind not our society, but one that has still retained the last vestiges of sanity and common sense. In such a society, the solution to the knife crime pandemic would offer itself.

First, the numerical strength of our police forces should be increased to a level necessary to combat crime. This being one of the few legitimate functions of the state, no expense should be spared.

Second, policemen should be authorised to do their job properly, with no regard for multi-culti perversions. If most people who are stopped and searched are off-white, then so be it – and so it should remain until such people no longer commit most knife crimes.

Third, our courts should pass much stiffer sentences. I’d suggest a mandatory, no-tariff sentence of 10 years for any crime whose perpetrator had a knife on him, even if the weapon wasn’t used; 20 years if it was used; and the death penalty if it was used fatally.

Again, we shouldn’t penny-pinch when it comes to building as many prisons as necessary and filling them to the gunwales.

I’d confidently suggest that only such measures could ever stop knife crime. However, I predict with even greater confidence that no such measures will ever be adopted. Instead we’ll be treated to more stories of ‘kids’ who are out to murder just for the hell of it.

A friend of mine once interviewed in a remand prison a chap who had fatally stabbed a man in the stomach. When asked how he felt about that act, the murderer admitted aptronymically to being ‘gutted’.

I don’t know what happened to him next, but I wouldn’t be surprised if, had he repeated that claim with sufficiently lachrymose passion at his trial, the evil creature got off with a light sentence.

By now he’s roaming the streets again, his trusted combat knife in his belt. The god of ‘liberal’ bilge has to be served.

An aptronym is a name particularly suited to its owner.

Thus we have Usain Bolt (sprinter), Thomas Crapper (inventor of various lavatorial fixtures), Russell Brain (neurologist), Jules Angst (psychiatrist) and so forth.

I’ve personally known a tennis player named Service, two unrelated financiers named Banks and, alas, a haemorrhoidectomy surgeon named Butts (his hospital was in Houston’s Drexler Street, which is a slightly more obscure aptronym, but one nonetheless).

According to one theory, those blessed with occupational surnames feel their gravitational pull and are subconsciously yet irresistibly drawn to those occupations.

The unexplored power of aptronyms may explain, at least partly, why the 39-year-old teacher, mother of three Brigitte Trogneux fancied her 15-year-old pupil Manu Macron. You see, Brigitte’s family owns Chocolaterie Trogneux, an Amiens company celebrated for its macaroons.

The French for that delicacy is macaron, just one letter apart from the name of that sweet schoolboy instantly smitten by Brigitte’s tight leather trousers. The aptronym and nature simply had to take their course, eventually steering Brigitte to her present honorary title of France’s First Foster Mother .

However, one would think that those who come up with company names would avoid aptronyms that make people laugh at the brand. Well, one would think wrong.

The other day, waiting for my train at Earl’s Court, I indulged my old habit of looking at all the ads. One poster showed the picture of a smiling young man next to the headline BYE BYE ED.

His beaming grin dispelled my first impression that the eponymous Ed was dead, and the poster advertised an undertaker’s service. Perhaps such ambiguity was intentional, designed to draw the reader in.

Well, this reader was indeed drawn in.

Turned out ED wasn’t the young man’s name. It stood for Erectile Dysfunction, a pandemic of biblical proportions, if the copy was to be believed. The advertised service promised to solve that embarrassing problem in short order.

Now I don’t know to what extent their promise stands up to scrutiny, as it were. Nor am I sure that such intimate issues ought to be discussed on 24-sheet posters, but then we do live in the twenty-first century.

Still, one has to accept that, if millions of young chaps like the one depicted in the visual suffer from this problem, it’s no laughing matter. However, the advertiser’s name is.

The email address for the company promising deliverance was given as Manual.co/ed/treatment.

The decision to be made here is whether or not this is an intentional aptronym. If so, then the company’s name hints at the treatment it advertises, making one wonder if it’s going to be merely recommended or actually administered.

Another possibility is that the ad is just a spoof, but this possibility is remote, what with hoarding spaces as pricey as they are.

Most likely is that this is just an unintentional aptronym producing an undesirable effect: making people like me laugh.

Now wouldn’t it be fun if Corbyn were named Jewson? And please don’t tell me that my name compels me to put the boot in every chance I get.

Our churches are alive with the beautiful, moving sounds of such hymns as Abide with me, Love Divine, All Loves Excelling, Lord of All Hopefulness and hundreds of others.

Yet as a life-long champion of diversity, I’m happy to report that in Russian churches one can be regaled with slightly different songs – also beautiful and moving, but in a somewhat different way.

The other day, St Isaak’s Cathedral in Petersburg housed a most spiritual and elevating choral concert.

St Isaak’s, in case you’re wondering, was designed by the French architect Montferrand and completed, at a cost of thousands of lives, in 1858.

Under the Bolsheviks, it was deconsecrated and used as a museum of atheism. Its centre piece, as I recall, was a Foucault pendulum, proving that the Earth rotates, rather than resting, as all Christians are known to believe, on the backs of three elephants or perhaps whales.

After the Bolsheviks restyled themselves as democrats, masses got to be celebrated in St Isaak’s again, but only on major feasts. The rest of the time, it still functions as a museum (though probably not of atheism) and an occasional concert hall.

The cathedral’s hideous neoclassical architecture is a more ornate answer to the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., which establishes an umbilical link between the two cities. This bond was further reinforced a few days ago.

A mellifluously polyphonic Petersburg choir delivered a rousing rendition of a song that, some purists may insist, was out of place even in a mostly deconsecrated cathedral, even though it does sound like a liturgical piece.

My feeble poetic ability isn’t up to the task of conveying the subtle nuances of the lyrics, so I shan’t even try to translate them in verse.

But this is what the first stanza says: “Our sub with a nuclear engine and some ten missiles each a hundred megaton, crossed the Atlantic and I tell the gunner, “Aim,” I say, “Petrov, at the city of Washington.”

And so forth, all in the same vein. (The Russophones among you can admire this work of art in the original: http://classic.newsru.com/russia/26feb2019/lodochka.html).

Someone must have forgotten to tell the Russians that Church Militant doesn’t necessarily mean Church Militaristic, but you must admit the lyrics do resonate, although perhaps not as much as the actual missiles would.

This is a clear case of art imitating life. For, in his message to the Federal Assembly the other day, Vlad ‘Botox Boy’ Putin expressed the same idea, though eschewing art:

“So that no one will blame me in the future, I’ll say it straight, to make it clear in advance what we’re talking about. Russia will be obliged to develop and deploy weapon systems that could be used not only against the territories from where a direct threat to us emanates, but also against the territories housing the centres where decisions are made to install missiles threatening us.”

Vlad then outlined the said weapon systems in some detail, but he didn’t feel compelled to spell out which objectionable centres he had in mind. Since he was responding to America’s decision to pull out of the INF Treaty, it went without saying.

Threats to nuke Washington and New York are common currency in Russia, and have been since Khrushchev, admittedly in his cups, boasted that Soviet scientists had created a nuclear device capable of wiping out the whole of the US in one blast.

But hysterical shrieks along those lines are now in a crescendo, making one wonder what kind of finale will follow. This may be nothing but empty bluster, but Western leaders would be ill-advised to treat it only as such.

One of the most hysterical shriekers is Dmitry Kisilev, the daily presence on Russian TV who’s known to his admirers as ‘Putin’s Goebbels’. In fact, he may be credited with striking the first chords some five years ago, when he explained that “Russia could turn America into radioactive dust”.

Then again, Mr Kisilev does sometimes talk too much, which loquacity has brewed some trouble in his family.

A few months ago, he proudly announced that his nephew Sergei had undergone some military training and then fought in the Ukraine. That bit of avuncular pride created a bit of a problem for the younger man.

You see, in common with many fire-eating Russian patriots he prefers to live elsewhere, perhaps because real beauty is best appreciated from afar. In that spirit, he became a German citizen, though evidently without breaking all ties with his motherland.

Now the German authorities were as impressed with Kisilev’s boast as his Russian audience was, although in a different way.

Sergei was arrested, charged with breaking arms laws and committing a crime threatening the security of the Federal Republic, convicted and sentenced to a long prison term.

This shows that ships aren’t the only things that loose lips can sink, which useful lesson I’m sure will go unheeded by Russian powers-that-be.

I’m not going to issue apocalyptic predictions, nor suggest how they may be prevented from coming true. My aim is more modest: outlining a background to the febrile bellicose hysteria gripping Russia.

This is being expertly whipped up by the Kremlin and its propagandists. Are they preparing the long-suffering population for war? Sorry, I did say I wasn’t going to broach apocalyptic themes.

That’s how André Previn, pianist, composer and conductor who died yesterday, is remembered in Britain, if the obituaries are to be believed.

The man might have composed scores for 50 films, winning five Oscars for his pains, and led or conducted just about every major orchestra in the world, but the first two lines of every British obituary invariably mention his marriage to Mia Farrow and especially his 1971 appearance in a hilarious Morecambe & Wise sketch.

In that sketch Eric Morecambe plays a hapless pianist who makes a mockery of the Grieg Piano Concerto, driving the conductor Previn (to whom Ernie Wise refers as ‘Preview’) to distraction.

When Previn finally points out that Morecambe is playing all the wrong notes, Morecambe grabs the diminutive conductor by the lapels and says: “I play all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order. Get that, sunshine?”

The sketch was indeed funny, but putting it in the lead paragraph of just about every obituary strikes me as a bit parochial. I would have put it somewhere towards the end, along with the reference to Previn’s five marriages, one of them to Mia Farrow, another to the German violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter.

Farrow was at the time a successful actress, while Mutter an even more successful performer. A good-looking woman, she pioneered playing in dresses that are best described as wardrobe malfunctions waiting to happen.

She had a particular taste in men, largely circumscribed by powerful conductors, otherwise known as stepping stones.

Karajan, Rostropovich, Abbado and of course Previn acted in that capacity, making Anne-Sophie the highest-paid classical soloist in the world, a position to which her rather modest talent alone wouldn’t have entitled her (although one never knows these days).

At the time of her affair with Rostropovich, irreverent Russian musicians indulged their propensity for risqué puns by calling him ‘mutterf***er’. No such pun was uttered about Previn, but then he wasn’t Russian.

It would be easy to mock the reviewers’ lowbrow treatment of the eminent musician (although none of them stooped as low as I just did), but one wonders if perhaps Previn himself encouraged such levity.

This immensely gifted musical polymath was a jack of all trades and, atypically, master of all. In addition to playing and conducting classical music, he was a virtuoso jazz pianist, and his film scores were rivalled by few composers.

Yet perhaps such versatility put some dampeners on his classical musicianship, stopping him just short of the greatness his lavish talent might otherwise have merited. Real music demands real, undivided commitment and punishes its lack.

It’s testimony to Previn’s talent that he wasn’t punished too severely, for his classical performances always were of a high, if not the highest, calibre.

Anyway, it’s thanks to his versatility that I had the pleasure of meeting this charming and witty man once. That happened in Houston, in the early 80s.

A friend of mine, Paul, was a jazz pianist whose trio was a fixture on the Houston club circuit. I went to their gigs often, partly because I liked Paul and partly because I fancied the singer who sometimes sang with his trio.

Previn was in town, with, if memory serves, the Pittsburg Symphony whose artistic director he then was. As was his habit, he liked to relax after a performance by listening to jazz and perhaps doing a turn himself.

When he approached Paul’s trio, they were having a break and chatting with me. “Do you mind if I have a go?” asked the conductor. Paul was never prissy about such things and, though he didn’t have a clue who Previn was, nodded agreement.

Previn sat down, exchanged a couple of words with the drummer and bass player, and went into a dazzling number way above anything ever heard at that club.

When he finished, the bass player said: “Gee, man, that was fantastic! Where d’you play, bro?”

“I got my own band,” said Previn, instantly becoming my friend for life – even though I’ve never spoken to him again.

RIP.