What our schools should tell lonely teenagers

The Bohemian countess who was a dab hand with a staple gun

Diana Phipps, Countess Sternberg, was “Bohemian in both senses of the word”, says The Telegraph. The eccentric do-it-yourself interior decorator, who died last month aged 88, spent her formative years in Častolovice, a vast castle in the Czechoslovakian region of Bohemia. And in her work she would transform drab rooms into “fevered, maximalist fantasies” using rolls of cheap cloth and her weapon of choice: the staple gun. Tall, stately, unconventionally beautiful and uncannily charming, she put on London dinner parties described by the philosopher Roger Scruton as “the last examples of the salon culture”. She would watch on with amusement, Scruton recalled, “at the great male egos she has invited – Gore Vidal, Roy Jenkins, Harold Pinter – as they lock horns and growl”. The Australian writer Clive James said she taught him a crucial lesson: “People don’t want to be charmed. They want to charm.”

Born in Vienna in 1936, Phipps was descended from “a cocktail of European nobility” on her mother’s side and some “healthy plebeian blood” from her grandfather, a Lancashire engineer who invented the torpedo. Her father Leopold was a “limping giant”, who nearly lost his leg in World War One while encamped on the Russian Front with “a valet, a bathtub, a case of champagne and his mistress”. When Častolovice was taken over by the Communists in 1948, she and her family decamped to the Ritz in Paris. They had a spell in relative poverty in the US, before she returned to Czechoslovakia in the wake of the Velvet Revolution and became an informal aide-de-camp for President Václav Havel and his wife Olga. She later said she realised the presidential couple needed her help when, during a state banquet for Margaret Thatcher, the cook flung open the doors and shouted: “Right! Hands up for chicken? And hands up for trout?”

Even prime ministers need a holiday

Keir Starmer has just made his “first serious mistake”, says Martin Kettle in The Guardian: he has cancelled his holiday. The new PM will have given himself “all kinds of excuses” for doing so. He has only just got into No 10; Iran is threatening to attack Israel; Britain is still “shuddering from the racist riots”. But everyone needs a holiday, prime ministers more than most. Besides, it’s not like the old days, when Stanley Baldwin could head to Aix-les-Bains every summer and avoid reading the newspapers, and Harold Macmillan could “refuse to leave the grouse moors of Yorkshire in August”. Had Starmer gone to Europe as planned, he would presumably still have had his mobile.

The problem, of course, is perception: the idea that the PM is slacking. Tony Blair and Boris Johnson liked their holidays in the sun and weren’t willing to “pander to the censoriousness of the press” about doing so. But temperamentally, Starmer is more similar to John Major, whose low-key summer trips to Spain and Portugal raised few eyebrows, and Theresa May, whose Alpine walking trips sparked little debate. Perhaps the most useful advice came from Baldwin. “It is difficult to travel like a private person,” he said, “so I have formed the habit of going to the same place, where everyone knows one and they leave one alone and respect our desire for peace and quiet.” If Starmer knows of such a place, he should book next year’s stay immediately.

Breaking the news with a squadron of homing pigeons

Watching the “nano-second messaging” of modern election coverage, I can’t help but think of pigeons, says Alan Cowell in Air Mail. “Carrier pigeons, to be precise.” Early in my career as a foreign correspondent, I was the last Reuters reporter who sent dispatches using the birds. While covering the seven-year bush war in Zimbabwe in the 1970s, I was deployed to a “far-flung spot” in search of guerrilla fighters. Out there in the “remote savannah and scrub”, it was impossible to communicate with the outside world – this was an era long before satellite phones “or, indeed, any phones”. But we had a lucky break. A friendly editor at a newspaper in Bulawayo sent us “a wicker crate of 10 carrier pigeons” trained to fly home to the southwestern city. From there, our messages were sent to the Reuters bureau in the capital, then transmitted on to Johannesburg, and, finally, back to headquarters in London.

Pigeons were “the internet of their time”. In 1850, Baron Julius Reuter used squadrons of homing pigeons to bridge a 76-mile gap in the burgeoning telegraph networks spanning Europe, flying “market-moving financial news” from Brussels to Aachen in Germany. Back in the bush, you could squeeze 400 spidery words on to the tissue paper from a 30-pack of local Madison cigarettes. You then folded this into a tiny container taped to the bird’s leg, gave it a kiss on the head and “tossed it aloft”. On our first attempt, the pigeon fluttered into the branches of a tree and refused to move. It transpired they would only travel in pairs, so we released another with its own note: “This bird is accompanying the bird that’s got the story.”