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99% ABC1
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Spectator life
INVESTMENT SPECIAL
30 March
22 June
21 September
30 November
R E BE C CA
HALL
Tough times for shopkeepers
The high street’s double-dip winners and losers
JUDI BEVAN
A
s austerity bites, competition
in the high street grows ever
more ferocious. Only the nimble and well-financed can thrive. While
January and February showed some
improvement and sunshine helped
boost sales in March, the trend looks
likely to be lower again in April. ‘The
situation remains fragile,’ said Judith
McKenna from Asda, chair of the CBI
retail survey panel. ‘Consumers are still
holding off from buying bigger ticket
items, and opting to spend on smaller
“treat” purchases that give them a lift
without breaking the budget.’
According to Asda’s Income Tracker, the average UK family has only
£144 of weekly disposable income to
spend, a fall of 6.5 per cent from a year
ago. Despite this, retailers polled by the CBI
predicted better trading in May: the hope is
that lower inflation will encourage consumers to spend more. Retail shares tend to benefit early in the economic cycle and despite
the official double dip, anecdotal evidence
still suggests recovery is on its way.
Amid the gloom there have been vast
differences in fortunes. Sports Direct, which
owns the Slazenger and Lonsdale brands,
reported sales up by 13 per cent last week and
expects to do well in the run-up to the Olympics. The shares have risen almost 40 per cent
this year but fans remain keen. Jonathan
Pritchard at Oriel Securities notes ‘a relatively low valuation of ten times earnings and…
good potential for the online business’. International luxury brands have bucked the trend
with shares in Mulberry, the handbag group,
up 63 per cent in a year.
Dunelm is another one to watch. A Midlands-based out-of-town homewares retailer with 100 stores, it is growing fast. The
shares have risen 15 per cent this year but
look set to continue their run. Companies
such as Dunelm and Next which successfully combine ‘clicks and mortar’ — stores and
online shopping — are very much in favour,
although Next shares (up more than a third
this year) look likely to mark time after a stellar performance.
A
Spectator Life is the exciting new quarterly lifestyle
magazine from The Spectator. It brings an intelligent
mix of art, drama, music, style, jewellery, watches,
investment and travel to the unique Spectator
readership – all presented in a sharp and elegant way.
Spectator writers, both established and new, give the
last word on what to see, where to go and what to
wear, sent out with The Spectator every three months.
Investment specials
T
16 March
4 May
5 October
2 November
tHE nEXt issuE :
• Jeremy Clarke learning how to shoot…
• Melissa Kite on how to survive Party Conferences
• A guide to “Afternoon Tea in London” by Melanie
McDonough
• Rising British Star Alexandra Roach
• Fraser Nelson in Scandinavia
• Investment special: How to buy an island & the
film industry closing its tax loophole
muck
bra S S
S
,
• Rhino Tagging on safari
• The new Jewel of Sloane Square explored
• Camilla Rutherford on pearls
• Ruby Wax on fraxel treatment
• Our Wish List
• Stella Tennant on “one to watch”
• Photo Essay: David Thompson’s book “What we
learnt at the Movies”
(all editorial subject to change)
In fashion, good management has proved
crucial. While Burberry (up 13 per cent on
the year) and Debenhams (up 18 per cent)
have done well, Aquascutum and Peacocks
have collapsed into administration.
In such uncertain times, investors prefer
companies with money in the bank. At Bank
of America Merrill Lynch, retail analyst Richard Chamberlain highlights companies with
the potential to use cash to buy back shares.
‘Over the long term,’ he says, ‘a successful
quantitative strategy has been to own companies that reduce their shares aggressively
over time.’ That has been one of the keys to
Next’s earnings growth, while Debenhams
is expected to initiate share buybacks in the
second half of this year.
Chamberlain also expects WHSmith
to continue to buy back shares at a rate of
£40 million to £50 million a year. Some City
observers feel chief executive Kate Swann’s
successful strategy of cutting costs and
replacing low-margin music with higher-margin celebrity books and quality stationery is
running out of road, but Chamberlain sees
further scope to cut costs. He also feels the
market is underestimating WHSmith’s international potential.
In the home improvement sector, Kingfisher is recovering some of its old form under
chief executive Ian Cheshire: its B&Q chain is
regarded as superior to rival Homebase,
while Chamberlain also believes Kingfisher has the potential to start returning
cash to shareholders.
As for supermarkets, the picture is as
gloomy as ever. ‘Against a background
of falling real income, food retailers are
having to work harder, [and] invest more
on better stores and marketing,’ says
Clive Black at Shore Capital. After Tesco’s profit warning in January followed
by marginally higher full-year profits of
£3.7 billion, the shares tumbled 20 per
cent and show little sign of recovering.
Tesco’s UK market share has slipped as
Asda and Sainsbury lure shoppers away.
The received wisdom is that in Sir Terry
Leahy’s last years the company reduced
UK investment to finance expansion
overseas which has not yet reaped rewards;
its Fresh & Easy venture in the US has to
date lost nearly £800 million. The jury is out
on whether new chief Philip Clarke can turn
the company back onto a growth track — and
the shares are best avoided for now. Of the
other supermarkets, Sainsbury has the best
momentum, says Clive Black, while Morrisons is being squeezed by US-owned Asda.
One company that looks ripe for a rally
is Marks & Spencer. Little seems to have
happened in the two years since Marc Bolland took over from Sir Stuart Rose at the
top; in the past year the shares have drifted
from 390p to 360p, where they languish on
ten times earnings. However, there are signs
that Bolland’s overseas expansion could soon
start to bear fruit and — not before time —
the company is increasing its online presence.
The food side has performed well, helped by
the trend for the squeezed middle class to eat
premium food at home, rather than go out.
And a campaign led by Joanna Lumley inviting customers to bring old clothes to M&S
stores for recycling, dubbed ‘Shwopping’,
shows a company in tune with the zeitgeist.
Investors can expect continued disparity
in performance, but shares in shops that have
used the past three years to invest, innovate
and trim costs will be the first out of the traps
when recovery finally materialises.
the spectator | 5 may 2012 | www.spectator.co.uk
Judi Bevan - Investment 1_05 May 2012_The Spectator_
25
25
1/5/12 17:27:14
Travel specials
26 January
23 February
27 April
29 June
28 September
28 December
BOOKS & ARTS
FINE ARTS SPECIAL
Outside edge
Unimpressed by the relentless
barrage of blockbusters,
Andrew Lambirth singles out
some small-scale gems
A
lthough it can’t be easy to run a
major museum in this country, and
balance the books as well as fulfil a
remit to provide the best possible conspectus of past and contemporary art for the
general public, our museums are becoming
increasingly narrow in what they offer. The
range of art on show in London, for instance,
has shrunk alarmingly, as the Whitechapel,
the Serpentine and the Tate pursue very
similar programmes, vying to be the first to
put on the same internationally fashionable artists. Big names are required to draw
the crowds, but these do not seem to be balanced by smaller shows of lesser-known artists, and the Tate in particular is failing in
its role to show the wealth of art currently
being produced in Britain, and the considerable achievements of British art over the
last century (not to mention the historical
collections).
The out-and-out success of Hockney at
the RA and Freud at the NPG will only spur
museums on to repeat the recipe, and provincial museums are following the pattern.
Unbelievably, an exhibition of ‘paintings’
by Rolf Harris opens this week at the once
distinguished Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, entitled with the TV entertainer’s
popular catchphrase Can You Tell What It Is
Yet? Admission is free, so I can only assume
getting large audiences into the building is
the aim, as if this will encourage people to
return and look at something a little more
intellectually challenging or aesthetically
nourishing than Rolf’s daubs. In the meantime, for many of us, the Walker’s credibility
as a serious museum has been disastrously
dented.
Down at the Royal West of England
Academy (RWA) in Bristol, the attempt to
lure the paying public continues (they had
a dreadful show of David Shepherd’s animal pictures recently) with a drawing of the
American singer Rudy Vallée purported to
CIty brEaks
Istanbul
Going deeper
Owen Matthews takes you beyond the tourist trail
Y
ou’ve done the sights: the Hagia
Sofia and the great imperial
mosques, the Topkapi Palace
and the Grand Bazaar, the Bosporus
cruise and Basilica Cistern. With the
tourist boxes ticked and the past
squared away, it’s time to start exploring the real, living city.
You may have had enough of museums, but Orhan Pamuk’s new Museum of Innocence in the Bohemian
neighbourhood of Cihangir is worth a
visit, if only for the abiding oddness of
the concept as much as anything in the
exhibits. The museum and Pamuk’s
eponymous novel were conceived at
the same time, and as Turkey’s Nobel
Prize-winning author wrote the book
about love and obsession set in 1970s
Istanbul, he also collected artefacts.
The result is a charming confection of
the paraphernalia of bourgeois Turkish life, from a collection of cigarette
butts supposedly smoked by the novel’s heroine to toys, cinema posters
and Victorian-era family photos. It’s a
monument to whimsy, a great literary
project and a vanished era all at the
same time.
Istanbul is one of the gourmet
capitals of the world, but you have
to dig a little to find its most interesting vernacular food. To really get
to grips with the authentic tastes of
the city, spend half an hour browsing
www.istanbuleats.com, a site (and for
the old-fashioned, a book) compiled
by passionate connoisseurs of Istanbul’s waterside fish-grilling joints, its
raucous raki-and-mezze restaurants
(known as meyhanes), and its endless
varieties of street food. You can trace
the social history of the city through
its restaurants, or take a gastronomic
tour of the rest of Turkey and even
the old empire, with its Balkan, Middle Eastern and Caucasian influences.
Anatolian soul food restaurant Ciya,
the subject of a New Yorker profile,
is definitely worth a trip to the Asian
side of the city, while the new breadand-stew restaurant Datli Maya is as
brilliant and tiny as its owner, culinary
wizard Dilara Erbay. Those committed to exploring Istanbul’s gastronomic underbelly can even find directions
to a pair of famous rival sheep’s head
restaurants located on opposite corners of a crossroads. One sells the
heads boiled, the other roasted (counter-intuitively, the boiled is better).
Of an evening, don’t get stuck in
the Old City — it’s a ghetto of touristy restaurants and pushy carpet pedlars. Istanbul’s real life is elsewhere, in
the mile-long strip of pedestrianised
streets around the old Grand Rue de
Pera, the heart of the European quar-
ter now known as Beyoglu. Start at
the House Café by the Tunel funicular
and work your way down Istiklal Avenue though back streets crowded with
tables and revellers. One can go highlow, literally and metaphorically, from
flashy socialite-packed rooftop bars
like 360 to grungy live music venues
like Haymatlos, concealed in a crumbling Ottoman office building. A full
tour of all the hidden bars and restaurants would take about eight years. At
two in the morning you’ll find Istiklal
Avenue still packed from end to end,
a sight that beats even Barcelona’s La
Rambla into a cocked hat.
After a heavy night in the city you
OWEn’s
Istanbul
may wish to escape to the Princes’
Islands, an archipelago in the Sea of
Museum of
Marmara where the Byzantines exiled
Innocence
their surplus royals and the Levantine
masumiyetmuzesi.
bourgeoisie of the late 19th century
org
built large wooden summer villas. But
one has to be smart about planning
Istanbul Eats
a visit, because on hot summer days
istanbuleats.com
they are also the equivalent of New
York’s Coney Island; a place where
Ciya
www.ciya.com.tr
every Istanbullu who can’t afford to
go anywhere else crowds onto packed
Datli Maya
ferries that resemble refugee ships. If
www.datlimaya.com you’re rich, take a ten-person sea taxi,
about £100 each way from central
House Café
Istanbul. Or take a public ferry from
thehousecafe.com
Kabatas, but on a weekday. On Buyukada, the largest of the islands, avoid
360
360istanbul.com
the ripoff tourist restaurants on the
seaside strip and hike (or hire a bike)
Haymatlos
up the mountain to the monastery of
Istiklal Caddesi 96,
Aya Yorge, with its charming open-air
Rumeli Han C Blok,
restaurant and breathtaking views of
2nd floor
the whole giant city of 15 million souls
which is spread at your feet, distant
sea taxis
and silent.
deniztaksi.com
the spectator | 30 june 2012 | www.spectator.co.uk
Travel_30 June 2012_The Spectator_
SAFARI
63
63
26/6/12 14:24:06
The ride of a lifetime
It’s not easy seeing the Masai Mara on horseback,
says Charles Moore – but it’s also impossible to forget
‘Blue Mass, Blue Angle, White Background’, c.1983–4, by Francis Davison
Fine art specials
‘Rye
1958,
bybyRoland
Paddock
Wood
‘RyeHarbour’,
Harbour’,
1958,
RolandCollins
CollinsatatMascalls
MascallsGallery,
Gallery,
Paddock
Wood
be a very early work by Andy Warhol, going engraver and, it now appears, writer. This
on show in July; will this draw the punters? book is her autobiography from 1908 to 1943,
The RWA certainly did well with its Ravil- with notes taking it to the end of her life a
ious exhibition in March and April, but Eric mere eight years later. It tells the Ravilious
Ravilious (1903–42) has rapidly become a story from the other side, and makes fascinational treasure, and his superb watercol- nating and moving reading. To coincide with
ours are now deservedly famous and widely the book’s publication, the Fry Art Gallery
popular. Mainstone Press has just published in Saffron Walden has mounted an exhibithe fourth and final volume in a tetralogy of tion of work by Tirzah and friends (including
well-produced picture books about him, this her husband), which goes on until 24 June. If
one called A Travelling Artist (£25), while you haven’t yet visited the Fry, I urge you to
the V&A has cleverly issued an excellent go — it is a gem of a small museum, packed
but inexpensive reprint of the classic 1938 full of fascinating work helpfully catalogued
book High Street by J.M. Richards. Very and arranged, with plenty of related books
scarce today, this book sells for thousands of for sale as well as the occasional drawing.
pounds and is all too often broken up for its The main gallery space houses the latest
superb Ravilious lithographs. But
you can
hanging of the permanent collection, with
BOOKS
& ARTS
now buy the V&A’s facsimile for just £20 — a room off for temporary displays, which is
a shrewd marketing move. Meanwhile, at the where the Tirzah display is.
other end of the publishing business, Fleece
The Fry is a small independent museum
Press has produced a sumptuous limited that has not only carefully defined its role
edition volume by Mrs Eric Ravilious (aka (to collect and exhibit the BOOKS
artists who lived
Tirzah Garwood), called Long Live Great and worked in north-west Essex) but also
Bardfield & love to you all (£234).
manages to fulfil it thoroughly. There are
It’s often not much fun being married to fine things in the Tirzah show — from her
an artist, particularly if you’re also one your- best-known images (the wood engravings of
self, and Tirzah was a talented painter, wood people, cats and interiors) to unfamiliar but
impressive paintings such as ‘Hide and Seek’,
a very green oil from 1950 looking down on
a garden sprinkled with white blossom, the
burgeoning ‘Harvest Festival, Loaves and
Fishes’ and three strange jungly pictures of
flowers and foliage. Ravilious was not the
most faithful of husbands, and Tirzah consoled herself at one time with John Aldridge,
an unexpectedly good realist painter, represented here by a striking self-portrait. Looking at Duffy Ayers’s rather lovely portrait of
Tirzah, it’s easy to understand the attraction
between them.
Another out-of-town venue that puts
on ambitious and worthwhile exhibitions is
Mascalls Gallery in Paddock Wood, Kent.
Its current show (until 30 June) is devoted to gouache landscapes by the 93-yearold Roland Collins, whose art is enjoying
a massive revival of interest. Collins works
in the romantic topographical tradition of
Ravilious, Piper and Bawden, but has his
own manner and artistic personality. A new
audience is very happily discovering his
skills, and sales of these beguiling paintings
have been more than brisk. If ever an artist deserved to be better known — on the
Nostalgic nationalist piety
spectator 19
may 2012ofwww.spectator.co.uk
Rogerthe
the spectator
Scruton’s
vision
a tolerant, age-old Anglicanism
—
church bells echoing over the countryside, calling the faithful
to prayer — doesn’t ring true to Simon Jenkins
44
Our Church
by Roger Scruton
Atlantic, £20, pp. 199,
ISBN 9781848871984
Parish churches are the sentinels of England’s past. They soar over every town and
village, pinning it to the nation’s soil. The
nave may be empty, the graveyard unkempt
and the roll-call of the faithful soon to cede
primacy to the mosque. But the Church of
England guards our rituals and speaks for
our communities. The English still want their
local spokesmen to be vicars not mayors.
Roger Scruton should have been a
bishop. He would have gone to the top,
and spared Anglicans their present agony
over whom to send to Canterbury. Archbishop Scruton would have gathered up the
church’s shattered canticles, creeds and conflicts and marched them to death or glory
with learning and charm. This book is an
elegant manifesto. It should have been a
job application.
Scruton claims to address his biography
of Anglicanism to believers and non-believers alike. Since the latter includes me, and
since we were both born into Nonconformist scepticism, I was intrigued to see how our
paths could agree on so much yet diverge
so widely on religion. The initial answer
appears to be that Scruton played hooky
from Baptist Sunday school by sneaking
round the corner not, like most of us youngsters, to the nearest smoking shed but to his
parish church. While we found a humanist
optimism, he seems to have found a godly
pessimism.
44
grounds of putting in long years of consistently good work to very little acclaim — it
is he; the success of his exhibition is heartwarming.
Another success story attends Ramiro Fernandez Saus (born Sabadell, Spain,
1961), whose work is increasingly sought
after in this country, and whose current
exhibition, Dreams in the Garden, at Long &
Ryle, 4 John Islip Street, SW1, until 9 June, is
almost a sell-out. The show was inspired by
The Tate in particular is failing in
its role to show the wealth of art
currently being produced in Britain
a stay in the Folly Garden at Stancombe in
Gloucestershire, and although Ramiro rarely paints from life, this extraordinary place
fired his imagination and began to feed into
his visions. The centrepiece of the exhibition
is a big painting entitled ‘The Artist’, depicting a monkey sitting on a table painting a
birthday cake. As always, strangeness vies
with humour, elaborate pattern with rich,
bright colour. Ramiro may paint with wiggly
outlines like icing on a cake yet his pictures
are as rigorously balanced and adjusted
as any more obviously rectilinear composition by an abstract master such as Ben
Nicholson.
Commercial galleries are increasingly
doing the job that museums should do in
mounting informative shows about artists
who deserve reassessment. A typical example of this can be found in Francis Davison: Collages 1973–83 at Austin/Desmond
Fine Art, Pied Bull Yard, 68–69 Great Russell Street, WC1, until 31 May. Davison was
an immensely distinguished collagist who
rarely exhibited, but whose 1983 solo show
at the Hayward Gallery impressed many,
despite (at his request) the lack of labels
and biographical information. This reclusive
and difficult man was married to the artist
Margaret Mellis, and was a great friend of
Patrick Heron. His remarkable abstract collages, made entirely of torn, found paper, can
be best understood initially within the context of St Ives modernism, though the best
of them transcend that categorisation. A late
series of small works, made from torn envelopes, is particularly beautiful and almost
unbearably moving.
19 may 2012 www.spectator.co.uk
Scruton’s Church of England emerged
from the middle ages an insular version of
the Protestant reformation. Since Henry
II, English kings argued with popes over
the demarcation between church and state.
Tyndale and Wyclif had forged an English
proto-reformation before the messy and
drawn out breach under Henry VIII. To
Scruton, Henry’s apostasy was not the theological opportunism of a royal sex drive.
It was conceived of a sacred compromise, a
God-sent amalgam of state triumphant and
church holy, of poetry and prose, of Calvin
and Cranmer. Anglicanism was Christianity not as ‘outward obedience to often nonsensical rules,’ but as ‘a truer and more
inward discipline’. God was not law — at
least not foreign law — but love of person
and love of place.
The non-believer can only find all this
hard to take. Early Anglicans were all over
the place, flirting with counter-reformation
under Mary and conspiring against Elizabeth. Many were vicars of Bray through the
troubles of the 17th century and subsided
into reactionary corruption in the 18th, selfsatisfied imitators of Rome’s episcopacy. It
was not Anglican tolerance that eventually
emancipated Nonconformists and Roman
Catholics, it was sheer weight of numbers.
The church could not strip half the nation
of civil rights or send it to America.
Only when seriously challenged by Wesley’s Methodists did the ‘genius for compromise’ eulogised by Scruton induce reform
and rebirth. But until the late 20th century,
Anglican bishops joined with the Tory right
to protest against every democratic or pro-
gressive measure. They opposed an end to
rotten boroughs, a wider franchise, Irish
land reform, Catholic emancipation, votes
for women and the parliament acts. Scruton
is right to applaud the church’s promotion
of much liberal learning, of great architecture and fine poetry, but as an estate of the
realm it was a disgrace. If the bishops had
had their way, Britain would have endured
a French revolution.
Even today the Church of England uses
its bizarre parliamentary status to oppose
Lords reform and retain extraordinary control over admission to many state schools.
And this despite being, Scruton admits, the
‘spiritual representative of a people whose
attitude to the Christian religion could be
described as one of loyal indifference’.
Protestantism has long offered its adherents the best of all worlds. In its Anglican
manifestation, it eschews gestures and rituals (up to a point) and resorts to words
as ‘the enemy of superstition … the torch
that lights our spiritual path’. Scruton sees
it ‘filtered through the landscape, through
the web of spires, pinnacles and finials that
the spectator 10 november 2012 www.spectator.co.uk
The church
of Owlpen, in
the heart of the
Cotswolds
45
stitched the townscape to the sky’. Its holiness resides in the Book of Common Prayer,
the nine lessons and carols and the echo of
church bells over the countryside, calling
the faithful to prayer.
He surveys all this with an indulgent
eye. He might be guiding us round a much
loved ancestral home, patting the Chippendale here, pointing to a Gainsborough there,
reminiscing about a dodgy uncle, quoting
Milton, Bunyan, Auden, Larkin. The very
language of the church, entrenched in the
17th century and never bettered, ‘endows us
with a mysterious key to God’s presence’.
Yet Scruton comes close to winking at
us. He quotes Orwell’s church as ‘a conscious artefact which, like good manners,
does not bear too close an examination’.
The appeal to words remains a device, a
trick. Protestants may deride the mumbojumbo of Roman Catholicism, but they
merely laundered it for north European
ears. The Anglican church is not on any high
road to reason, rather a more user-friendly
version of the original, so as not to frighten
the squeamish.
Scruton writes beautifully about a subject
to which he is clearly devoted. His church
was once a tribal superglue, its strength
indicated by never taking real hold among
the Celts. He reminds us why we love English churches, their music and ritual, their
traditions and, usually, their clergymen. But
I have an uncomfortable feeling that, were
he an Aztec on a ziggurat, he would equally celebrate the blood of 1,000 sacrificial
Scruton might be guiding us round a
much loved ancestral home, patting the
Chippendale and reminiscing
virgins, hallowed by custom as it cascades
down the steps to succour God’s earth.
Nor can we escape the final paradox.
Women and gays have replaced Wesleyans
and Irishmen to torment the Anglican faithful. Were Scruton true to his cause, he would
surely sympathise with the church hierarchy as it struggles ‘in prayer’ with the reactionaries to sustain the secular yet sacred
compromise. Yet he is splendidly partisan.
Present-day Anglicans are no longer Tories
the spectator 10 november 2012 www.spectator.co.uk
at prayer but ‘the Labour party trying to
remember how to pray, while not really
understanding the point’.
He appears to deplore his church’s
continued attempt to compromise with
the state, on gender equality, adoption,
homosexual marriage and sex education.
What Scruton professes to be a ‘quiet, gentle, unassuming faith, that makes room
beneath its mantel for every form of hesitation’ is castigated as a church in denial,
cringeing before ‘the onslaught of political
correctness’. I sense a man who wants to
have his cake and eat it.
Our Church is beautifully written in the
cadences of a lay preacher. Its nationalist
piety is nostalgic and undeniably attractive.
Scruton’s parting thought, that a minority
Anglicanism may yet decline into a fragmentary congregationalism, is realistically
radical. He knows his faith in the round, and
derives from it comfort and delight. But by
deserting scepticism, he inflicted on himself
a needless pessimism, when the smoking
shed offered the light of reason and good
cheer.
45
2 March
18 May
14 September
19 October
O
n the third day, we left our
original camp to ride 30 miles
to the next. There were 15 of
us, including our leader Tristan Voorspuy and two Masai grooms. We had
all gathered for a moment in a salt-lick
when a dik-dik, one of the smallest of
the African antelopes, shot out from a
bush under our feet. The horses reared
and bucked, each frightening the others. One of our party, Sophie, fell on to
the hard ground, and cried out in pain.
She had broken her wrist.
Much of the Masai Mara is remote
from proper roads, let alone from hospitals and doctors. Tristan did what
he could by intermittent mobile telephone to find the Flying Doctor. We
rigged up a shelter of Kenyan kikoy to
protect poor Sophie from the sun and
debated, at a decent distance, whether
we should photograph her as she lay
in agony. On the one hand, it would be
intrusive. On the other hand, when all
this was over, we reasoned, she would
like evidence of her adventure. We
photographed her.
After more than three hours, we
could hear the helicopter of the flying doctor. Until then, the country
had seemed quite empty, but at the
46
sound of the blades, a little crowd of
Masai emerged from the wait-a-bit
thorns and watched at what books
call ‘a respectful distance’. Sophie was
stretchered and sedated, and she and
her mother vanished in the sky, heading for Nairobi.
I mention this disaster first, because
it is as well to put off anyone who
thinks that Voorspuy’s Offbeat Safaris are just elongated pony treks. You
have to be a reasonably fit and reasonably experienced rider (both of which,
I should add, Sophie is), and then have
a bit of luck too. You will sometimes
have to ride for six hours a day, and
sometimes gallop. When you gallop,
you will often be doing so across mara
which is pitted with holes made by
spring hare (the African kangaroo).
In places, these holes are completely
invisible because of long grass.
You will also need to be able to stay
on and get away fast if charged by wild
animals. If you fall off in such circumstances, you will almost certainly be
rescued by Tristan galloping up with his
whip and driving your assailants away,
a prospect which many women find
alluring. You may also wish to jump
(though you never have to), because
the spectator 19 November 2011 www.spectator.co.uk
the spectator 31 December 2011 www.spectator.co.uk
47
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