The former BBC cricket commentator Henry Blofeld — the Old Etonian is famous for addressing all and sundry as “My dear old thing” — has given an entertaining account of “Doing Nothing in Norfolk”.
The 80-year-old, who is in splendid self-isolation with his wife Valeria at their country cottage, said he made sure he stocked up on good wine.
Ever the man to get his priorities right, he says that before going into lockdown, “we drove purposefully to a neighbouring wine store. It would be bad enough to conk out from coronavirus, but to die of thirst would be beyond careless.”
There was also “time for a no-holds-barred dash into a supermarket. Ready-made fish pies, curries and all sorts of goodies flew into our trolley where they nestled happily among cheeses, fruit, yoghurt and the rest. Blow the expense, this is an emergency!”
He did have a scare when he woke up “on the first day of our isolation, two weeks ago, with a dry cough, a runny nose and the distinct feeling I had been hit by an Ian Botham bouncer…..My doctor, however, was sure I had an ordinary cough and cold. Phew!”
Blofeld received “a phone call from a television company. They wanted to come up for two days and film us Doing Nothing in Norfolk: two more days of frenetic inactivity.”
It so happens that Henry Blofeld’s father — Thomas Robert Calthorpe Blofeld, 1903–1986) — was at Eton with Ian Fleming and is believed to have been the inspiration for the name of the James Bond supervillain, Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
This explains why Blofeld felt he had “won the jackpot when novelist and biographer Nicholas Shakespeare appeared on the other end of the line. He is writing the ‘final’, definitive biography of Ian Fleming, whom I had met in London and Jamaica in the early Sixties.
“Fleming was an acquaintance of my father’s and he had of course lassoed our family name, added a white pussy and a ‘Mr Bond’ or two, and gone for broke.
“Nicholas told me he had just been down in Cornwall talking to an amazingly fit John le Carre, presumably about Fleming. I told him about meeting Fleming in my club in St James’s in London and also on my first honeymoon, in Jamaica, at a lunch at Fleming’s house, GoldenEye, at which Noel Coward was also present.”
As a cricket commentator, though he sometimes made mistakes identifying fielders, he remained a favourite with listeners. Blofeld endeared himself to Indian viewers with his obsession with earrings worn by ladies in the stands and boxes during the Sharjah matches.
He points out: “There is humour to be found in almost everything — and that includes the coronavirus. If you are able to see any humour in all the gloom that is around us, it will make the process of enduring it a lot easier.”
He is also catching up on his reading, including a racy new biography on the love life of Dickie and Edwina Mountbatten: “They both hop endlessly into other people’s beds. It’s stirring stuff.”
He is going for walks in the country with his wife and trying to learn the names of birds and flowers. “Curiosity is another thing that is rewarding, for we are all having to cope with new circumstances and there will be some pleasant surprises along the way if we are prepared to look for them.”
He has told the Daily Mail: “We must look at self-isolation as a great opportunity to widen our horizons and not simply as a grim exercise of bunkering down with our faces to the wall.”
He recognises that “there are many who have been nothing like so lucky as I have been, both now and in my life as a journalist and cricket commentator”.
He has an encouraging message: “Whatever you do, do your utmost to keep on fighting, keep smiling and be ready to laugh. I promise you, better times lie ahead.”