Spoil sports

Low life

My boy was on half-term holiday last week so I renewed our family railcard and we went up to London for a day out. We left Devon at nine and arrived at three: six hours instead of the scheduled three, owing to a signalling failure, a track-side fire, and the evacuation of the buffet steward on a stretcher at Bristol Temple Meads, which wasn't bad we thought.

Our first port of call in London was Stanley Gibbons, the philately shop in the Strand. My boy has begun collecting stamps. To get him up and running I gave him an old stamp album I'd inherited. He took it immediately to the library to look in the stamp catalogue to see what it was worth, and found he had a French stamp valued at L750. We'd brought the blue and orange two franc stamp up to town with us, hoping that one of the philately experts at Stanley Gibbons would confirm this valuation and maybe hand over a massive wedge of ready cash for it on the spot.

You don't have your stamps valued at Stanley Gibbons, you have them 'appraised'. An appraisal costs L5, said the woman behind the desk. What was a fiver to us when my boy had a stamp in his hand worth L750! I waved away her mention of an appraisal fee as though it was such a small trifle it wasn't worth speaking about, and the woman pointed to a bench in the waiting area.

After about five minutes an expert came over, carefully examined the stamp, then thumbed through his catalogue. To the naked eye, our stamp was not dissimilar to the stamp worth L750, he said, but the watermark was different. In mint condition our stamp was worth only ten pounds. My boy has been brought up in the Stoic tradition and so hid his disappointment. The expert wasn't fooled, though, and softened the blow by kindly waiving the appraisal fee.

To cheer ourselves up we went to Trafalgar Square to retrieve coins thrown into the fountains by superstitious tourists. For my boy, born and bred in a hopelessly mean-spirited little West Country market town, Trafalgar Square is the very apotheosis of our great city, and the coins in its floodlit fountains a symbol of its munificence. He doesn't get up to town much, but when he does we always go there, sit on the edge of the fountain nearest to South Africa House, roll up our sleeves and fish for coppers in the cold pellucid water. Only this time a man wearing a fluorescent green jacket with the doom-laden words `Heritage Warden' on the back came sauntering over, tapped my boy on the shoulder and told him to stop what he was doing. `Not allowed,' he said. The words were said kindly enough, though at one fell swoop they destroyed any fond ideas my boy might be entertaining about English liberty. He tried not to show how disappointed he was. So did I. We moved on.

In the Charing Cross Road a dozen antiwar protesters were gathered at Edith Cavell's feet. Some of the faces were contorted in anguish, as if the prospect of a small war a long way off was already having a markedly deleterious effect on their mental health. I observed as much to my boy as we went by, but the only interest he showed was out of politeness. We turned left into Leicester Square, where a noisy crowd was jammed behind temporary street barriers. They were waiting for a glimpse of singer/actress Jennifer Lopez, about to arrive for the British premiere of her latest film, Maid in Manhattan. We managed to secure a place right next to a barrier, but a long way from the cinema. If Jo-Lo turned up in a limo and went straight in, we were wasting our time. My boy said he hadn't heard of Jennifer Lopez. I didn't know much about her either. My recommendation to my boy that we stay to try to catch a glimpse of her was based solely on her reputation for having a stupendous arris.

Coveys of tipsy, pedestrian, orange-faced party guests arrived at the security cordon, where they were briskly searched for weapons of mass destruction. They were an ill-dressed, dissolute-looking lot. Close up, Ralph Fiennes's face, in particular, suggests that if there is any vice from which he is exempt it is only because no one has told him about it yet. Jennifer Lopez arrived last of all in a Mercedes with blacked-out windows, which dropped her off outside the cinema. We could hear the screaming from where we were, but we couldn't see her. `Jo-Lo! Jo-Lo!' we chanted. And trooper that she is, she heard our cries and came right back along the barrier to show herself to us. All of sudden there she was, Jennifer Lopez, right in front of us, offering my boy a gloved hand. He declined it. She looked absolutely terrified.

Copyright Spectator Mar 8, 2003
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