Spectator Life

I was robbed in Tokyo recently, an experience as unexpected as it was distressing. Despite long years in London, plus decades of rough and ready globetrotting to some of the sketchiest places on earth, I have never been a victim in any of these notorious crime hotspots (I feel snubbed especially by London), but this was the second such experience in supposedly the safest city in the world.   What are the odds? The first time I dropped my wallet in a branch of the bargain bucket Don Quijote store and later received a phone call from the staff saying they had it, with ID cards intact but 50,000 yen gone. This time there was no phone call, it’s all gone, a similar amount of cash but far more worryingly, my entire suite of credit and ID cards.

The world is full of people fierce in the belief that they know the right diet to make your children glow with superior health. Few are shy about saying so. Fortunately, I’m here to help. I happen to know exactly what should go into your mouth, and into theirs, and, although you haven’t asked, I’m happy to tell you. My confidence comes from the psychology department at Durham University, which has just published the results of a long-running experiment on getting children to eat their greens. Our broadsheets have summarised their findings with due reverence: ‘getting children to eat their vegetables starts in the womb’ (to quote the Guardian). ‘The secret to giving toddlers a taste for greens may start in pregnancy,’ agreed the Telegraph.

Can it be anything more than sour grapes when a writer (who has not been asked) gets snarky about Hay Festival? I’d like to think it can. For there is a lot to snark about.  Don’t get me wrong. The one time I was invited to speak at Hay, about a decade ago, it was jolly nice. Benedict Cumberbatch said hi to me in the green room, thinking I was someone he was meant to recognise, while Ian McEwan milled about topping up his coffee. Hay is, of course, a pornographically pretty town amid the rolling sheep-studded fields and quaint little streets with pop-up Eccles cakes shops and independent bookshops.

Before the birth of my first child, I had never been around a new baby. I had also never seen a woman in labour, so I wasn’t remotely prepared for my own. My first came close to an emergency caesarean because, after six hours of pushing, I still had not gotten my daughter out. When she was finally born, weighing over nine pounds, I felt overwhelming gratitude for the women who had stayed by my side through it. I will always remember one particular midwife with short-cropped grey hair and a barking voice, who coached me through the contractions like an unrelenting PE teacher. Without her, I don’t know if I could have done it. In her commanding presence I was part of a team and we had won a great victory together.

It's that time of year again. The giddy middle of May. When millions across the English-speaking world gather to find out who has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize.  This year's shortlist, drawn - as ever - from a diverse selection of not-European, not-male authors, is particularly enriching and profound. As the committee itself puts it, the stories ‘bring compelling characters to life in sharply drawn settings, exploring themes of power, family tension, resistance and unheard voices, alongside courage and unexpected connection. Among them are a keenly observant domestic worker, a young woman whose henna art enables silenced women to speak, and a resourceful young sheep farmer’.

I must thank Harry Mount for alerting me to the National Trust’s forthcoming partnership with the Japanese cartoon leviathon Pokémon, although he provided no such early warning system for their partnership with the British cartoon character Shaun the Sheep in 2025. I was thrilled to see that one of my local Trust properties is taking part. In the 30 years since Pokémon’s launch in Japan, it has become a $90 billion media franchise, stretching across TV shows, films, video games, trading cards and toys, transcending barriers of language, nationality, age, class and sex. According to YouGov, one in five Brits has played Pokémon Go, rising to more than half of Gen Z.

Like many families, we used to have a TV in our kitchen. But the default response when there was nothing immediately to be done became to reach for the remote. This suggested we were all developing a woeful lack of gumption so, when we moved house several years ago, I became a television dictator: it’s verboten Monday to Friday, and our 15-year-old monitor, with its cracked screen and unreliable controls, has long been relegated to the sitting room.  Every so often, however, I find my own resolve weakening. This happens every April when SVT, the Swedish national broadcaster, streams The Great Moose Migration, all day, every day, for three weeks.

Any loser can drive a posh car but it takes real character to drive a crap one. If a sports car is a penis extension, then a rust-bucket screams Big Dick Energy. Even, or especially, if you are a woman. I picked up my own crap car, a 2007-plate Nissan X-trail, five years ago because I moved to the countryside and needed a workhorse to replace my previous car, a Honda CR-V, which I’d bought for £500. Prior to this I had a Volkswagen Type 2, which cost £18,000, but every time you turned the key in the engine you still had to hold your breath.  My Nissan looks like it has just been in a fight – and lost. The heating has gone. The seat covers are ripped. The sunroof jams. The battery light flickers on and off like it’s trying to communicate in Morse code.

Once upon a time Frenchmen regarded themselves as the world’s greatest lovers. These days they think of themselves more as fighters. Sexual partners have been replaced by sparring partners. President Felix Faure famously died while being pleasured by his mistress in 1899, but the blows favoured by today’s male politicians are administered to punchbags. Emmanuel Macron loves to box. His wife, Brigitte, told Paris Match in 2023 that her husband puts on his gloves twice a week for ‘45 minutes of training, warm-up and core-strengthening boxing’.  Macron regularly poses for photos wearing his boxing gloves. In March 2024 he was snapped hitting a punchbag. The more cynical wondered if there hadn’t been some ‘enhancement’ to the president’s bulging biceps.

‘A working-class hero is something to be.’ Even coming from a man less steeped in irony than John Lennon, it should never have been possible to take this statement sincerely. But more than half a century after the ex-Beatle released his thoughts on the straitjacket of class, rock fans continue to take Lennon at his word.  How else to interpret the musings of people like Rick Beato? As YouTube’s most notable music critic, the white-haired rock musician and producer has become the latest figure to bewail the dominance of rich kids in the music business.   ‘When I do these top 10 countdowns on Spotify, I go back after I make the video and I look at the artists and I see what their background is,’ Beato says.

Today, Rivals returns for a second series on Disney+. The first series was that rarest of phenomena: an adaptation that didn’t hate its source material. Sure, the producers decided to cram the plot with more subtle-as-a-sledgehammer politics than appears in the actual book, but you could tell they revered Jilly Cooper and the world of Rutshire and wanted to do it justice. Cooper executively produced the first series but must have been away on some days (I can’t see her let a well-heeled huntswoman pronounce the Beaufort hunt ‘Boh-fore’ rather than ‘Boh-fuht’, particularly when a major scene in the book hinges on the pronunciation of ‘Belvoir’).

When I was in my teens and twenties, older people told me that they were exhausted just watching how I lived my life. I careered through my youth in a fog of football matches, protest marches, pubs, clubs and raves. I treated sleep as an inconvenience and I’d increasingly arrive home at daylight, not quite sure how the evening ended or where that bruise came from.  ‘Wait until you’re our age,’ oldies would say. ‘You’ll slow down too. Then it’ll be your turn to look at the young with bewilderment.’  Well, I did the slowing down part. After we were all locked down in 2020, I never fully unlocked again.