Spectator Life

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.

Is any tourist attraction on earth really worth enduring a madding crowd to see? My mother, denied international travel for half her life by the Soviet state, made up for this deprivation by becoming the world’s most fanatically rigorous tourist. A major site left unseen or portion of a museum unexamined was, to her, as morally repugnant as leaving food on the plate or abandoning a book half-way through.   I, spoiled frequent flyer that I am, find crowds the ultimate holiday buzz-killer. Nowhere is this more true than in Rome, which clocked a record 52.92 million overnight visitors for the Papal Jubilee year of 2025 and, according to pre-bookings tracked by the local tourist board, is expecting even more tourists this summer.

‘Citrus marmalade?’ Well, that’s a tautology, if ever I’ve heard one. I’ve been making marmalade for a long time and written about it extensively. I wouldn’t quite paint myself as a marmalade obsessive (I’ve met them, and I know that I cannot literally or figuratively compete), but I’m certainly a marmalade fangirl. They line my cupboards and are a breakfast non-negotiable. I seek out unusual citrus fruit, and pore over old preserve cookery books. January is officially marmalade-making season in our house and, for the full month, every window is steamed up, every surface is slightly tacky from over-zealous jarring.

‘It won’t last,’ my schoolfriend Albert told me, as we staggered down Embankment one summer evening in 2018, a few pints into his birthday pub crawl. I wasn’t sure as to what he was referring. The evening twilight? His youthful good looks? Our ability to walk in a straight line? He expanded: ‘Harry and Meghan. She’s not right for him. They’ll be divorced within five years. Just you wait.’ Then he burped. I was surprised by Albert’s comments. I, like tens of millions of other viewers, had been taken in by the royal wedding weeks before. Yes, the presence of Oprah Winfrey and an over-enthusiastic American preacher had been a little gauche.

When I was a child, I always wanted to watch television during supper, but my dad wasn’t keen. He preferred family conversation and as we chatted over a meal he would try to gently steer us towards more pleasant subjects rather than the vulgar or provocative topics I tended to propose. ‘A meal is a sacred thing,’ he’d tell me.  I spent my secondary education at a bizarre school run by a quasi-Vedic cult, where table manners were also important. Before lunch, we chanted a Sanskrit mantra. The organic vegetarian food was to be offered, not grabbed. We sat upright, our backs as straight as any Himalayan yogi. We were told not to eat more than we needed. Naturally, I sneered at much of this as angrily as any teenage Clash fan would.