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WHY ROBINS?

Robins are put on Christmas cards to remind us how lucky we are not to be Italian. Italian children have to eat robins at Christmas, also starlings, wrens, gulls, sparrows,
budgies, owls, finches, blackbirds, and, if daddy is a bit shortsighted, hot-air balloons and microlite aircraft. If they do not eat these all up, they do not get a tangerine in their stocking,
they get a horse’s head.

WHY DID THE ANGEL OF THE LORD COME DOWN?

We cannot be certain, but the likeliest explanation is that an Italian was on a Bethlehem winter break.

WHY DID THREE SHIPS COME SAILING BY?

Seeing three ships come sailing by on Christmas Day in the morning is a sign of good luck. It means that the one carrying 30 million poundsworth of nice new luxury motor cars
has not collided with a second one and then been run into by a third.

WHO FIRST DREAMT OF A WHITE CHRISTMAS?

Irving Berlin. When the Berlin family arrived in New York from Russia, they were so poor they had to live in Harlem, where Irving was four feet too short to play basketball. One
Christmas Eve, the lonely teenager was staring miserably out of the window watching the neighbourhood kids slam-dunking, when his father asked him what he was dreaming of. Pretty soon, the family
was so rich it could move to a lovely big house on Long Island, where Irving took up golf.

IS THERE ANYTHING WE SHOULD KNOW ABOUT THE CHRISTMAS PUDDING?

Yes. The Bishop of Lichfield has already explained about Herod’s funny little homicidal ways, but you may not know that it was something that ran in the family. Bringing
in the Christmas pudding commemorates his daughter Salome’s serving him John the Baptist’s head on a plate. The rumour that her father was not as pleased as he might have been because
he couldn’t find the threepenny-bit should be ignored: the traditional insertion of a coin dates from Christmas 1649, when, to express everybody’s gratitude for the decapitation of King
Charles I, Cromwell’s Auntie Doreen, in a gesture of unprecedented Puritan frivolity, poked a groat into his yuletide bap.

C
OULD
I have got into bed with H. G. Wells? Those little bandy legs. That pot belly. A moustache flecked with his favourite
nibble, jellied eels. It would be like kissing an otter.

Or Bertrand Russell? All very nice, strolling into the Café Royal on the arm of a celebrity liable to come out with ‘Matter is a convenient formula for describing what happens where
it isn’t’ and get all the sommeliers stamping and whistling, but at some point in the evening you would be bound to find that long beak in your ear and a skinny hand whipping up your
thigh like a concupiscent crab.

Or Napoleon? Haemorrhoids, as I recall. Or would, no question, were I about to squirt a couple of rounds of Numero Cinq onto my heaving balcon and turn back the eiderdown. And there was also the
unusually small matter of that desiccated relict in its tiny casket which came under the Sotheby’s hammer a few years back. Not much tonight, Josephine, one gathered.

Now, were you – a long shot – Professor Irving Davies of the University of Wisconsin, you would find it odd that, in a long fantasy life, none of the above had ever occurred to me.
As most men, I imagine, I have seen myself as most men I imagine: I have been up Everest, round the Horn, over the top, behind the stumps, before the mast, between the posts, under the volcano, and
am possibly the only man ever to have dreamed of being the author of Walter Mitty. But I have never yet wondered what it would be like to be a mistress, and it is this that Professor Davies would
find odd, since he has just presented a paper to a major shrink conference, identifying ‘the common male fantasy of reincarnating as a kept woman’.

Lawks-a-mercy, Professor, you do know how to turn a girl’s head! Having never thought about this before, I now find it hard to think about anything else. What sort of woman would I come
back as, petite or voluptuous? There is much to be said for being miniature and thus likelier to kindle the protective flame, but if I were petite I should have to be pert, and I cannot see myself
as pert. If I were voluptuous I should have only to be dumb, and it is a lot easier being dumb. Then again, I might run to fat a lot more quickly than if I were petite; I should have to diet to
keep the man who was keeping me, and there’s no logic in reincarnating as the desideratum of someone eager to stand me 14 courses at the Gavroche if I have to stick to Ryvita and Perrier to
hold him. Alternatively, I could plump for something a mite more recherché. Recherchée. History’s roster of concubinage is pockmarked with the
jolie laide
, which, for
the poorer linguists among you, is of course French for jolly laid. Jósephine Beauharnais had a goatee, Emma Hamilton was built like a Martello Tower, Traudl Mühler-Röstow had a
squint so divergent that the Prussian junkers who flocked to her boudoir were all too frequently not the ones she had had her eye on, while the fact that George Sand could easily be mistaken for
George Sanders mattered not a fig to top bananas like Alfred de Musset and Frédéric Chopin, who could have had their pick of midinettes with the sort of figures that would get
Trappist monks tunnelling under the wire. Yes, all things considered, I think that’s me settled.

But still unsettled, too. What of my ideal man? You will have gathered from my opening remarks that I have misgivings about being Lady Ottoline Coren, or Mrs Patrick Coren, or even The
Cricklewood Lily: rubbing shoulders with the great is all very well, but it doesn’t stop at shoulders, and the vast majority of the great, then and now, strike me as satyriatical ratbags of a
highly unprepossessing order. I do not wish to be taken briefly and peremptorily between division bells or first and second halves/rounds/acts/races/ wickets/courses/guitar solos, these
representing a fair sample of the working environment for a girl like me. Nor, though I enjoy
The Desert Song
as much as the next girl, do I fancy returning as a common law Begum Aga
Coren, spending all day mooching around a requisitioned floor of the Dorchester with Number 89 on my back, waiting to be tannoyed into service. And as for aiming any higher, it should, I think, be
made clear that if I had to come back as Camilla Parker Coren, I wouldn’t go in the first place.

What remains? Droning barristers, ponderous telly-pundits, unctuous quacks, preening chefs, honking bankers, celebrity gardeners, viagrated tycoons . . . face it, girls, when you come right down
to it, what I’d really be looking for would be some hunky bald sexagenarian with GSOH and several of his own teeth who knows how to treat a lady and doesn’t kiss and tell. Quite what
Professor Davies would conclude from that, however, I shrink from imagining.

M
Y
new stamping ground is quite unlike my old stamping ground. In the high and far-off times, Best Beloved, when I stamped
the Cricklewood ground, peeking through this nocturnal window and that, the faces were all screenlit by
EastEnders
. Here they are all screenlit by their next novel. In my old local, men
wept into their Guinness and cursed their foremen; in my new one, they weep into their Chablis and curse their agents. In my old betting shop, the punters queued to back horses; in my new one, they
queue to back each other: they are not interested in the Cesarewitch or the Lincoln or the Oakes, only in the Booker and the Whitbread and the Somerset Maugham. Oh, look, there is Beryl Bainbridge,
about to lay a pony on A. N. Wilson, who is waiting behind her with an earful of mobile, getting the SP on Melvyn Bragg. Who is sucking his pencil at the counter, wondering if the going suits
Margaret Forster, who is sitting in the window, watching the tic-tac man across the street signal the odds on Martin Amis. Who is by the wall, squinting through his rollie-smoke at Beryl
Bainbridge, checking her fitness.

In short, this is a booky spot: a square half-mile packed to the chattering gunwales with people who write books, review books, broker books, tout books, publish books, sell books, and –
fortunately for all of these – buy and read books. And each and every one of them, producer and consumer alike, is bibliomaniacally competitive. They are all fixated on the dread that someone
might be bookier than they are. Which is why a glittering booky couple about to quit this place have, willy-nilly, bequeathed it a passing shot that is felling casualties on every side.

Mr and Mrs Michael Frayn are decamping from Primrose Hill for Richmond. Having sold up, they are packing up, but while the former has merely made their neighbours glum, the latter is driving
them nuts. Because Michael, in a newspaper interview, let slip that the biggest headache of the move was encrating their 250 metres of books. And seconds after this news broke, through every local
window issued a low and terrible keening, punctuated by the snap of steel-measuring tapes whizzing back, time and again, into their little cases. But not enough times or agains: for through those
same windows the residents could see the Post Office tower, a mile away, and torture themselves with the thought that the Frayn library was taller: stacked, it would have clouds on it. And they
have just measured their own, to discover that it would come not even half-way up.

It is the meterage that has thrown us into a tizzy. Hitherto, we have measured books in numbers, since the most important thing about literature is, of course, how many bits of it you have got:
5000 is smug, 8000 is preening, 2000 derisory, and so on. So it was extremely important to know how many books the Frayns owned to see how we ourselves shaped up against a benchmark of the paragon
litterati. But meterage frustrates this utterly: people are mooching Primrose Hill, wondering, for example, if the Frayns keep only hardbacks. Were this so, they might have a scant 4000, if the
books were really fat (e.g. do they keep all their old copies of
Who’s Who?
), which would be pretty unimpressive against our 7000 paperbacks, though these occupy only 97 metres. And
do they keep their phone-books on the bookshelves, and if so are they flat, taking up thrice the space, and are their very tall books flat, too, atlases and art books and cookbooks and gardening
manuals, and if not, are they upright and slanted, and is Frayn including the space left by the slant?

Then again, since we are talking about two major readers here, how many of their books are duplicated? Michael might well have popped into Daunts to buy something, even while Claire was forking
out for the self-same book in Hatchards. What about the books neither of them paid for? Surely review copies shouldn’t count, or signed copies brought round to dinner by friends too stingy to
buy a bunch of flowers? Where do we stand on three metres of
Encyclopaedia Britannica
or the
OED
, are these four dozen books or merely one of each? Can I make myself believe the
Frayns have the complete 572 Barbara Cartlands and cannot bring themselves to bin them rather than ship them to Richmond, never mind the quality, feel the width? But if they have brought themselves
to do that, then how many more metres than 250 might they have binned or Oxfammed? There could have been unimaginable lengths of Blyton, Archer, football annuals, AA books, Gideon bibles; the
unwinnowed Frayn collection might well have stood higher than the Empire State.

See, the crates are sealed, the van is chugging up Gloucester Terrace; I shall never know, now. But what the hell: it is Richmond’s turn to measure and gnash.

I
F
you think I do not give a fig for Jude Law, you are mistaken. We are all communities, these days, and since he is my
Primrose Hill neighbour, I must be there for him. That, five years ago, I went there for me is neither here nor there; nor is the observation that you would not expect a man called Jude Law to end
up on Primrose Hill: you would expect a man called Jude Law to end up on Boot Hill. A man called Jude Law should be a mythic bounty hunter with a Colt on his hip and a Derringer in his hat, riding
into some rickety wooden town at high noon, bent on cashing in on the head of Jesse James, only to find that Jesse has a hip and a hat of his own, and also, as a lay preacher, knows a thing or two
about the quick and the dead.

But on Primrose Hill, the real Jude Law is alive. And kicking. That is what caught the attention of the press, who gleefully reported his booting out of his fiancée Sienna, following his
discovery that she was knocking off his best friend Daniel Craig. The press did it gleefully because it was only recently that they had reported Sienna’s booting out of Jude for knocking off
Daisy Wright. Sienna was particularly ratty because Daisy was their nanny, but let me say in my neighbour’s defence that if Miss Wright comes along, a chap cannot pass up his chance of
happiness on the meagre grounds of taste.

So then, is this
Jeu d’esprit
just about spooky names? Well, yes, especially if we take into account the icy fingers of Sadie Frost, formerly Mrs Law, which sent a shiver down the
spine of her busily bi-lateral neighbour Kate, the neighbourhood’s rolling Moss who, though she may not as yet have gathered any Stones, has certainly come tumbling down Primrose Hill and
broken a fair few of the crowns that reign over her feckless community. (Amateur paparazzi wishing to make a bob or two with their snapping cellphones will find them holding court outside, where
else, The Queens.)

And in all this there is a yet spookier name to address. It is Primrose Hill itself. Which, when I got here, was a rather different community, one that is now, as you might guess, not entirely
happy with recent changes: it had grown accustomed to preening itself for being an idyllic literary backwater – part deep, part shallow – where a blissful riparian peace, all too rare
in London, was disturbed only by the plangent ping from a platen as Alan Bennett or Michael Frayn or Claire Tomalin or Martin Amis or Beryl Bainbridge or A. N. Wilson or Simon Jenkins reached the
end of yet another immemorial line. The community even tolerated the odd arriviste wag, on the pitiably optimistic grounds that he might one day come to his senses and try his hand at a novel.