Read a luscious edition of the The Guardian Weekly in March.  Didn’t know where to look first, so bursting was it with stimulation and that beautiful assured insouciance I don’t find elsewhere. The week after wasn’t a patch which just goes to show it’s a fine chemistry of reader, writer and possibly, weather.

Nancy Banks-Smith, the television writer, is always good.  Here she is on something called Famous, Rich and Jobless on BBC1 about the “down-and-outs,” Meg Matthews, Emma Parker Bowles, Diarmuid Gavin and Larry Lamb.

In case they’re not famous enough, she says, “Meg used to be married to a member of Oasis, Emma is the Duchess of Cornwall’s niece, Diarmuid Gavin is a landscape gardener and Larry Lamb’s an actor.”

Larry Lamb refused to even consider looking for a job.  Emma Harrison and Craig Last, who were there to comfort and chivvy, found him on the vast, bleak beach, happy as a sandboy.  “What a beautiful day!”  They pointed out that, in a perfect world, if you get a Jobseeker’s Allowance, you should seek a job.

Never was an actor more misnamed. The lamb roared.

“Patronising bullshit!  Excuse my French.  I don’t want to go drifting around knocking on doors, because I’ve got enough grub in my belly.  Forget about it.  Not doing it. You do it your way.”  (Lowers voice ominously.)  “I’ll do it my way.”

*****

There was also an article by Lucy Hughes-Hallett on the story of the woman who tried to kill Mussolini, The Hon Violet Gibson, whose father was Lord Chancellor of Ireland.  In 1926, Hughes-Hallett explains, at the time of their “bathetic encounter,”

Mussolini was a splendid figure of a man who liked to display his muscled torso shirtless.  Violet was tiny, emaciated and not much loved.  She was 50 years old but looked 60, and was odd enough in her behaviour to have been twice admitted to sanatoria for the mentally ill.

After her attempt on his life, Violet was again admitted, this time for 20 years.  Once that time had past, Hughes-Hallett says, “history might have endorsed [Violet's] political judgement,” the Duce having been defeated and lynched in his turn, but …

… two decades in an asylum had done nothing for her sanity.  She belaboured fellow patients with a broom handle.  She believed her moods created the weather.  She never came out.

Apparently, Mussolini was aghast at being shot.  “Fancy, a woman!” he’s reported to have said.

He was ready, he said, for “a beautiful death”, but Violet, one of the “old ugly repulsive women who come from abroad in groups”, was not the kind of person he wanted to be killed by.

*****

The same issue of The Guardian Weekly also featured a review of Ransom, the book by Australian, David Malouf, based on the episode of The Iliad in which King Priam visits Achilles “to beg for the body of his son Hector.”

The reviewer, Michael Dirda, quotes from the scene in which the “rough-hewn but voluble” Somax, a man who has lost all his sons and daughters, drives Priam to the Greek camp.  Somax offers to share his simple lunch:

“These little cakes, now, since they’ve caught your eye, sir — pikelets they are, or griddlecakes as some people call them — were made by my daughter-in-law.   Best buckwheat flour, good thick buttermilk, just a drop of oil … The lightness comes from the way the cook flips them over.  Very neat and quick you have to be …”

Dirda takes up the story:

Through his increasing admiration for the naturalness of the mule-driver, a new Priam begins to sense that “out here … everything was just itself.”  Whereas court life was ruled by formal discourse, in nature “everything prattled.  It was a prattling world.”

*****

And last but not least I heard a funny radio interview with the Australian novelist and short-story writer, Peter Goldsworthy.  Goldsworthy was discussing how he still practises as a doctor and how it helps his writing: it limits the time he spends in writerly isolation and gives him new material.

He cited an example.  A woman he’d been treating was in palliative care, dying.  She was 86 and he was visiting her to give an injection of morphine.  He prepared the needle and approached her saying, “It’s just a little prick.”  She looked straight at him, and said:

Never mind, dear, you’ve got nice eyes.

*****

Image: Violet Gibson’s mug shot (courtesy of The Nation)

To read Lucy Hughes-Hallett’s review of the book, The Woman Who Shot Mussolini by Frances Stonor Saunders, click here.