Life

The USSR is striking back. Nearly forty years after its collapse, there are a growing number of young people in the West who are now avid enthusiasts of the Soviet Union. Curiously, this is a somewhat apolitical phenomenon. Lenin and Stalin apologism still remains the preserve of the chubby, the slobby, the grizzled and the graduate student, no matter how avidly they wave their flags at protests. Instead, Soviet culture and style have become decidedly in vogue, whether that be the resurgence of the Slavic doll look, schoolboys making TikToks to the USSR national anthem, or viral videos of abandoned Communist buildings. Defanged and denuded of its political belief system, Soviet aesthetics are decidedly cool.

As if the British hospitality industry hadn’t experienced enough government abuse, September saw yet another blow: permission for cities to levy a tourist tax on hotel stays. But not quite so fast. Such a tax need not be bad news: it depends on how you levy it. Done cleverly, a tax on hotel rooms could boost revenues for the classier end of the hotel industry. And I have a few ideas on how to do it. Wine-drinkers know that, within reason, spending a few pounds more gets you much more Barolo for your buck The first rule is that you must not levy the tax as a percentage of the room cost – in which case, it will have a downward effect on people’s propensity to spend. Instead, it must be a flat fee.

It was another Jennifer – Jennifer Grey of Dirty Dancing fame – whose desire to tamper with the face that the good Lord gave her made her the object lesson in not fixing what ain’t broke; especially, in her case, one’s nose.  At the age of 26 Miss Grey was pretty enough to be believable as the teenage paramour of heart-throb Patrick Swayze in the wildly popular film, but not so pretty that she alienated the female majority of the potential audience. She was the perfect rising star. But a totally pointless nose-job two years later, and a second procedure to allegedly fix an issue with the cartilage, so altered her appearance that it made her unrecognizable.

Summer’s over – so say the Cape, the Shore and the Sound. But summer homes in the country remain wide open. Is summer a season? Obviously. It’s also a vibe. And in seasonal towns, both end hard and fast on Labor Day – no more white, no more linen, certainly no more white linen. Morning frost creeps into the garden, much to caterers’ dismay, and the beach – never quite that warm, even in August – becomes a non-starter. We all take the cue that the fun is over, it’s time to return to real life. Two weeks drinking on a boat off Italy gives me the ick. Don’t tell that to my friends in Corporate America The line between season and vibe blurs more incongruously in the country, however. The most noticeable tell is the traffic.

Provence “Would you like to meet Eric Idle? Don’t worry, he and his wife Tania are smashing.” This was 2009. I was visiting my old art teacher from school, Frank Docherty, and his wife, Chrissie, in the village of Montfort-sur-Argens. Eric had a house nearby, they said. They’d got to know one another a few years before when Eric had begun buying Frank’s surrealist paintings. I was too wee for early Python but as a teenager knew every line of The Life of Brian. And all the voices. I apologize now to anyone who was on late-night double-decker buses from Paisley to Glasgow in 1982.

The hunting season began in Burgundy last Sunday. The first couple of weeks are dedicated to the pursuit of small game: pigeons, partridges and hares. Call it the hors d'oeuvre to the main course: the hunting of wild boar, which gets underway in earnest at the start of October. My neighbor, a farmer, hunts, and so does his son and most of their friends. They spent much of Sunday blazing away in the adjacent fields. I felt like I was in the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Not that I mind. I was a townie in another life but now I’m what the French call a plouc (yokel), and in rural France hunting is sacrosanct. It’s also imperative, specifically the culling of wild boar. Their numbers have exploded in recent years and the damage they do is immense.