Convenience Big Store: Blowing smoke rings with Jane Birkin

23 July, 2023

Life

Birkin in La Piscine, 1969

"We played it cool, we jived and blew smoke rings"

Jane Birkin's brother Andrew and I were "illicit smoking buddies" at Harrow, says Upstairs, Downstairs actor Simon Williams in The Oldie. We had plenty in common, but best of all, he had a sister, Jane, "who I fell in love with before even meeting her." I had a sister too, Polly, and we quickly became a foursome. "We played it cool, we jived and blew smoke rings, we played kick-the-can." The Birkin household was in Chelsea. Jane would take me stomping up and down the King's Road pointing out all the "long-haired beatniks" and everyone in their bright colours "determined to forget the war". One evening I arrived to find Jane and her "heroic" father David, who had been a spy during World War II, giggling and drinking champagne together. Only later did I find out they were celebrating her first period. She had been the last in her year at school to get it.

We moved to Paris about the same time and would wander along the Seine "trying to work out how to become movie stars." When she got her first part in Blow-Up, Jane was nervous about the nudity. "My tits are just miniscule," she laughed. But in the end, she said, it was a piece of cake. "I walked about all day totally naked and nobody seemed to even notice." She tapped easily into the zeitgeist of Paris life and became an icon, but never took herself too seriously. People said she gave up on love in the end and was happy living alone. But I'm not so sure. I remember her once quoting the Tennyson line: "It's better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all." We shook our heads – "we weren't so sure about that."

Property

THE COUNTRY HOUSE The Ivy is an 18th-century, grade I listed manor in Chippenham, Wiltshire. Its 5,500 sq ft interior includes five bedrooms, multiple large living rooms, and reams of period features, including elaborate fireplaces and modillion cornicing. Outside, there's a heated swimming pool, an orchard and a croquet lawn. Chippenham train station is a five-minute walk, with trains to London Paddington taking just over an hour. £3m.

Quirk of history

Cillian Murphy in Oppenheimer

Robert Oppenheimer's fall from grace

Most people remember J Robert Oppenheimer as the mastermind behind the atomic bomb, says Kai Bird in The New York Times. But his later life was marked by political tragedy. In 1954, he was hauled before a "kangaroo court" in Washington DC, forced to defend himself against charges that he was a security risk. The evidence was at best "flimsy": while a student, Oppenheimer had attended a few left-wing events and had a relationship with a Communist. Most people now agree he was targeted because of his vocal opposition to building an even more deadly weapon – the hydrogen bomb – capable of destroying all humanity. Nevertheless, a vote of 2-1 stripped Oppenheimer of his security status, accusing him of harbouring "a serious disregard" for national secrets. He became the "chief celebrity victim" of the McCarthyite anti-communist "maelstrom".

Oppenheimer's downfall is poignantly relevant to our current political predicament. He was destroyed by a movement characterised by "rank know-nothing, anti-intellectual, xenophobic demagogues" – some of whom went on to serve as political mentors to Donald Trump. His fate created an environment in which scientists are afraid to speak out, and policymakers dismiss intellectuals they don't agree with as politically motivated. Today, officials don't listen to experts like Sam Altman on the risks of AI, for example, and plenty of leading health figures with dissenting views were silenced during Covid. That's the "real tragedy of Oppenheimer": his persecution illustrates the way politicians can close down the kind of civil discourse we desperately need to help us make wise decisions on new tech.

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On the money

Jackie Kennedy. Michael Ochs Archives/Getty

In 1956, Jackie Kennedy met for a summit lunch with JFK's father Joe at Le Pavillion restaurant in New York, says J Randy Taraborrelli in his new biography Jackie. When she told him she was fed up with her husband's cheating, the Kennedy patriarch panicked that this spousal fall-out would impact his son's presidential ambition. So he proposed a deal: Joe would pay Jackie $100,000 – the equivalent of $1m today – for any child "carried to term", so the couple could appear to have the "perfect" family life. In November 1957, Jackie gave birth to a daughter, Caroline, and Joe "made good on his promise", depositing $100,000 into her bank account the same day.

Zeitgeist

Take a moment to chat... Getty

Why brief encounters matter

"Human connection is the best preventative medicine," says Noreena Hertz in The Sunday Times. That's why it matters that rail firms are closing ticket offices at train stations. Technology, which is meant to make our lives better, is denying us the daily contact with others that is as essential to health and happiness as exercise and food. "To understand why, you have to travel back to our hunter-gatherer origins." Because humans can only survive in groups, our bodies have evolved to react in a "host of negative ways" to a lack of socialising. "Our blood pressure, cortisol levels and heart rate all shoot up when we're lonely."

You may not think "brief encounters" at ticket offices help much. "But they do". Researchers have found that even a 30-second chat with the barista in a coffee shop makes you feel happier. Last week, a Japanese study showed that social interaction makes the brain more "voluminous" and less likely to develop dementia. And it's no good just blaming companies. Each of us – ordering Deliveroo, working from home, doing yoga with Adriene on YouTube – bears some responsibility. The result is that today's youth are the "loneliest generation" yet. So take a minute to chat to the lady in the post office; call your friends instead of messaging them; and next time you're queuing for your train ticket, consider "asking the elderly person in front of you if they need some help."

Books

Polly Toynbee loafing around in 1966. Getty

A lifelong obsession with class

For someone who aspires to do away with societal divisions, says David James in The Critic, Polly Toynbee is "obsessed with class". Her new memoir, An Uneasy Inheritance, begins with the "reductive and depressing statement" that "class and money are at the heart of everything". She is so preoccupied with social status that every character introduced is immediately allocated to a "finely graded sub-division". Throughout, there's an inescapable sense of "self-loathing". Toynbee describes her life as a "posh left-winger" – her ancestors, most notably the historian Arnold Toynbee, "influenced British culture" throughout the last century – as being like "walking across a minefield". She repeatedly writes that she's "ashamed to confess" one of her close relations was a Tory MP.

But what's most staggering is Toynbee's rank hypocrisy. Take, for example, independent schools: she claims to hate them and makes several "predictably snide" comments about Eton, failing to mention that most of her children were privately educated. "Principles can be useful when writing another op-ed piece, but they can be awfully irritating when they intrude on one's life." Toynbee criticises the entrance exams she sat for Oxford as being constructed to "reward people of exactly my background". Does that stop her accepting a place? "Of course not." The book's title is "perhaps unintentionally" revealing: her inheritance might be "uneasy", but not entirely undesirable. The idea that she could reject it altogether and lead a life "genuinely committed to helping those less privileged" – like the politician John Profumo did at Toynbee House (named after her great grand uncle) – is clearly "too genuinely radical to contemplate".

An Uneasy Inheritance by Polly Toynbee is available to buy here.