Xtra Diary: In the Mood for the 14th...London Zoo's residents get in the mood for Valentine's Day
Published: 12 February 2010
In the mood for the 14th
LONDON Zoo released pictures on Wednesday of one of its oldest residents getting in the mood for Valentine’s Day at the weekend.
The snaps, taken by the zoo’s head of reptiles Dr Ian Stephen, show Dirk the Galapagos tortoise cuddling up to enclosure mate Dolly at the zoo in Regent’s Park. Dirk is around 70 years old and weighs in at about 31 stones.
How two romantic sisters took on the Nazi machine
IT may have felt as if it was a plot from a Mills and Boon story, but it was in deadly earnest – and could have ended in death.
I suppose innocent Ida Cook, a typical Englishwoman of her times, didn’t quite realise what she was getting into when she decided to help desperate people flee Nazi Germany.
A successful writer who churned out the equivalent of today’s “chick-lit” page-turners, Ida was visiting Berlin in the mid-1930s with her sister Louise when they came across Jews and other “undesirables” in Germany desperate to flee.
Anyone else might have tutted with a sense of helplessness and then do nothing. But Ida and Louise, romantic souls with a sense of Christian ethics, decided to act, and over the next few years helped people to escape to Britain, providing sufficient funds to persuade the Nazis to let them go.
They knew the odds were against them, and that one wrong move could set the German terror machine against them. But like all good romantics they just had to hold out a helping hand, no matter the repercussions.
The story of the two sisters was recounted by biographer Anne Sebba at the Wiener Library in Marylebone on Tuesday.
Here were two innocent respectable church-going middle-class Englishwomen. Louise a clerk, Ida a new member of the Mills and Boon stable of authors, both lovers of opera who, on holiday, embarked on running an escape route with the sort of skill that experienced espionage agents would have envied.
Yet they succeeded, bringing over scores of people to these shores.
Their quiet heroism later earned them recognition from Israel as being among “the righteous”.
Both of them lived in Dolphin Square, West End, and had died by 1991, but on the pages of their autobiography, Safe Passage published by Harlequin, their ordinary-extraordinary lives are still gripping.
“I think they were just innocents,” their nephew John Cook said after the talk. “I knew them well and they were simply irreproachably nice. I’m sure they probably never quite knew what danger they were in. But if they had known it would have made no difference.
“They just wanted to help people.”
And their sense of fairness and romanticism lives on.
Tennis – come rain or shine
It wasn’t so long ago that Andy Murray was just a rather anaemic-looking whelpish boy-man, who looked about as at home on a tennis court as an Eskimo in the desert.
Now look at him – the veins on the neck, the Incredible Hulk torso, the Wolverine beast arms.
Just as Dunblane was an unlikely breeding ground for a soon-to-be grandslam champ, the latest wannabe dream factory is better known for other things. The Paddington Sports Club – just down the road from the eye of a recent tennis storm at “the rec” where management have come under fire for squeezing out its long-serving coaches – has now applied for planning permission to erect a futuristic tennis dome over its outdoor courts.
The dome will allow time-pressed tennis enthusiasts and those of us who don’t like to thwack balls in the driving rain to play into the evening, come rain or shine.
Annie's landmark canvas
From the BBC broom cupboard to the galleries of W1, it’s been quite a journey for artist du jour Annie Ralli.
The Bristol-born painter, is showing the latest collection of her work at the The Colomb Gallery in Marylebone next month.
No children’s television props or ropey Blue Peter backdrops in sight, but there are plenty of the capital’s more recognisable landmarks as well as some of her more abstract subject matter. The exhibition opens on Monday March 1 at the gallery in George Street.
See www.colombart.co.uk
