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.

Today is Celebration Day when we are asked to remember the people we’ve loved and lost. My first reaction to the idea, was a groan. Really? Who needs another dedicated day? There are already more of them than there are days in the year, so some have to share. I’ve never taken any notice of Mothers’ Day, or Fathers’ Day, (and neither, sadly, have my children), let alone Potato Day, Upcycling (what’s that?) Day, Black Cow Day, or International Pisco Sour Day. There’s even a Love Conquers All Day, for heaven’s sake.   But I’ve come round. When someone important to us, who inspired or helped us, or whom we greatly loved, dies, we mourn them painfully for a period - and then stop talking about them altogether.

Tilly’s children now refuse to tell her when another one bites the dust. Recently, they joke, they have been able to see the whites of her eyes when they say that Ludo or Verity has been pulled out of school because his or her parents have been hit by VAT on school fees. When Tilly quizzes them about the parents’ finances, they roll their eyes and tell her to stop being so nosy.  Standing on the steps of the children’s smart prep schools in Kensington, Tilly partakes in the faux-martyrdom of the other mothers about how they all have to tighten their belts now that school fees have rocketed, but she knows they’re not really suffering: they’ve all just come back from Verbier and are about to load their offspring into sleek black Range Rovers.

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.

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’.

It’s Chelsea week - officially the start of the Season - so brace yourself for acres of breathy coverage and All The Tropes from SW3. The Royal Walkabout! Red-coated Chelsea Pensioners being patronised! Glossy influencers who wouldn’t know a peony from a Philip Treacy pillbox hat knocking back champagne! Expect many, many shots of people’s backs as they struggle to see anything for the price of their £122 (or more) ticket.   Oh, and the gardens themselves. Something of a sideshow to the main event of being seen to be there, the format rarely deviates. There’s the ‘Eco’/ 'rewilded'/ 'woo woo'/ ‘hortiwoke’ garden; essentially a curated collection of weeds you could see on any railway embankment.

Dominic, known since his teens as Dom, enjoys telling people that he’s Catholic, or a ‘left-footer’ as he sometimes modestly describes himself. He feels it a distinction that gives him a bit of mystique in the financial services circles in which he moves. Non-Catholics are often mildly interested in his education by monks, his views of the papacy and whether he goes along with all the ‘rules’. But while Dom has lots to say on the matter, the truth is that the devout Catholicism of his upbringing is receding into distant memory, kept alive by a kind of niggling unease on Sunday mornings when he must decide whether or not to go to church.

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.

‘Congratulations! We’re delighted to inform you that you’ve made it through to the fifth stage.’ At this point, I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry. I’d done the HR screening call; completed the written task; got through the first-stage interview and then repeated myself in the second. So what, exactly, was left? A PowerPoint presentation? A half-marathon? Solving a Rubik’s cube underwater?   Experiences like this became a common feature of my life after I was made redundant from my job at a technology magazine in 2024. While I was fortunate enough to secure regular freelance and contract work, the lack of a fixed salary quickly created friction elsewhere.

For centuries, as a dinner party guest you ate what you were served. Nobody dreamed of calling up their host in advance demanding what they would like on the menu. This is one reason why the dinner party somehow made it through the 1980s era of Tom Wolfe’s ‘Social X Rays’ – Mid-Atlantic society-types who ate nothing and resembled skeletons. Previous threats to the dinner party included the first drink driving laws, which Bron Waugh claimed ruined country social life. Then came the cocaine diet guest (no food touched), who has been spiritually succeeded by the equally annoying Ozempic-jabber, bragging to their hostess about how ‘unhungry’ they feel.

If you’re at a high-profile but dreary launch of a political memoir at Daunt Books or find yourself in the Red Lion in Westminster any weeknight after six, Samuel Ordington-Mortimer will almost certainly be there, too. You usually hear him before you see him: a braying, gleefully indiscreet voice regaling his listeners with the latest salacious tidings at top volume.   By the time he hoves into view, a florid figure whose flushed cheeks perfectly match his claret-coloured trousers, you can expect either a cry of ‘dear boy’ or ‘darling girl’, regardless of how well you know him. There then follows a parade of cheek-kissing, occasionally with a ‘friendly’ squeeze on the arm or buttock, depending on how many glasses of wine have been consumed that evening.

Before I had ever been to a funeral, I imagined what it would be like: a grim, depressing affair. The sky would be leaden and there would be rain. There would be deeply sorrowful music – Adagio in G minor by Albinoni, a verbose elegy, stiff hymns, muffled sobbing, regulatory prayers and afterwards egg sandwiches, polite chatter and weak cups of tea. But this version of a funeral has changed in recent years and has become more relaxed and celebratory, perhaps in line with declining church attendance. A recent Co-op Funeralcare study found that 68 per cent of people agreed that funerals should be more of a celebration of life, up from 58 per cent in 2019.

As the results are being announced for this year’s local elections, I am reminded of where I was almost exactly a year ago: standing in Carn Brea Leisure Centre in Redruth, Cornwall waiting to hear my neighbours’ verdict on me and the Conservative party.  The Count stalks my memory like I’m Mina Harker.   To be fair, it wasn’t the worst six hours I have spent in a provincial sports hall - it ranks somewhere between a team-building five-a-side football tournament and my GCSEs - and I’m glad I didn’t take the Liz Truss option of waiting in the McDonalds across the street.  I had never been to a count, and so didn’t know how much of what we watch on election night is pure theatre.

So, the Met Gala has rolled around again, with the predictability of death, taxes and the knowledge that some of the world’s most tedious celebrities will be photographed wearing some frankly bizarre outfits. As with the Oscars, the gala is a display of how deeply unfair it is to be a woman at these events. Men turn up, traditionally, in inoffensive displays of black tie, although this year’s theme of ‘costume art’ saw Colman Domingo appear in what looked like a Wetherspoons carpet and the 32-year-old Bad Bunny decided to anticipate old age by dressing like a man in his late seventies, complete with silver hair and grandfather make-up. God knows why.

This week has seen Prince William and Catherine Middleton celebrate 15 years of marriage, with the occasion marked by a suitably heartwarming family photograph of them and their children on holiday in Cornwall. Theirs has been a union that has generally received a good press, bar the odd salacious rumour about what William gets up to in Norfolk and near-constant speculation about Kate’s weight and appearance. However, her revelation two years ago that she was suffering from cancer led to a wave of public sympathy that has suggested that she, not Meghan, is the true heir to the compassionate, grounded legacy of Princess Diana.   If only the same might be said of the rest of her family.

To my mind, there can be few more perfect games than backgammon. Equally at home in an Iraqi teashop or played atop a fur in a plutocrat’s ski chalet, it is a game punctuated with bitter glares, bemused chuckles, and outrageous reversals of fortune. For those not yet initiated, the aim is to race all your men (pieces) to your home section and off the board first, avoiding their being knocked off the board and sent back to the beginning, while delaying your opponent’s men as much as possible. It blends luck and skill, and is at times infuriating, but always fun.  The name we know dates to 1635, but it has been played under other names and variants for at least 1600 years – 5000 if you think The Royal Game of Ur is close enough.

In recent years it’s become a hackneyed truism that Nordic nations have found the key to happiness. The Danes, who often take first place in global rankings for mental wellbeing, pride themselves on hygge, that feeling of cosiness evoked by wrapping oneself in blankets and being surrounded by candles. The Swedes promote lagom, the concept of the optimal medium. And while the Finns also appear to be satisfied with their lot – Finland came first in this year’s World Happiness Report for the ninth time in a row – they have no well-known term that encapsulates their attitude to life. In the spirit of Nordic oneupmanship, however, that could be about to change.

A farmer in Derbyshire is going to make his cows uglier to try to deter  modern agricultural impostors. These impostors are neither foxes nor badgers but social media influencers who keep showing up to film content with his animals.   They arrive in waves. On one occasion, dozens surrounded Alex Birch’s herd at the edge of a field. Another time, a yoga teacher unfurled her mat and filmed a class beside the cows, as though they were props in a bucolic stage set. Wearied by the intrusion, Birch now speaks of crossbreeding his Highland cows to make them ‘less photogenic’.

Bullfighting season in Spain began earlier this week at Seville’s huge annual fair, known as the Feria de Abril. A couple of days before the fair began, at a corrida de toros (‘running of bulls’, translated into English as ‘bullfight’) in the Andalusian capital’s beautiful 18th-century bullring, one of the country’s best-known bullfighters (toreros) was badly gored in the rectum. The reaction from anti-bullfighters, pouring out on social media and in comment threads, was entirely predictable: he deserved it.   This sort of hateful, knee-jerk reaction to bullfighting can be ignored as the ranting of morons.