Spectator Life

When people ask Matt what he does for a living, he sometimes replies that he’s a historian. Oh, they say, feigning mild interest, might I have read anything that you’ve written. At which point he has to admit it’s unlikely, unless they have a particular interest in Year 9 reports.  To be frank, Matt fell into being a history teacher. In three years at Durham, he became a master at speed-reading the introductions to books and writing semi-plagiarised essays while still mildly drunk at 4am. Despite his father’s hopes that he might cash in his unexpected First, a punishing summer internship at an American bank persuaded Matt to stay in academia a little longer.

We longstanding residents of Oxfordshire have had a lot to put up with in recent years. First, there were the Beckhams with their faux flat-cap invasion of honey stone Great Tew and queasy talk of 'Golden Beez' honey. Then came Hollywood proper in the form of Ellen de Generes in her quest for ‘Engerland’: a Frankenstein vision of romcom The Holiday and indeterminate fantasies about the Old World. Last, came Maga as American Vice President J.D. Vance’s motorcade howled through the village lanes of Dean last summer. But frankly, we ‘aint seen nothing yet.

This summer’s news that the charity shop retail bubble has begun to burst should, in a normal civilized society, elicit solemn sympathy. Yet, I’m struggling to shed a single tear. In fact, across the country, I bet a collective, cynical cheer is rising from the cobblestones. Recently, Cancer Research announced plans to shut 200 shops, while disability charity Scope warned that over half of its high-street estate is at risk. Sombre charity sector spokespeople complain shops are buckling under rising costs.   Well, for the last three decades, I’ve watched their hostile, tax-sheltered colonization of our town centres. Are they now cracking under the weight of their own bloated administrative overheads?

These wildfires are terrifying. We had a billowing blaze in the barley field next to us in Kent only a couple of days ago. Within moments it was yards away from our ancient tumbledown cottage. Mercifully, the wind abruptly switched direction and the flames and smoke moved away, finally beaten down by the local farmer and fire crew. It was soberingly close call.  Those folk in Stourbridge, West Midlands, last week were less lucky, with 19 houses destroyed, and 18 badly damaged. Looking at the photos of the stark, smouldering wrecks, I can almost smell the awfulness. The reek of a burned out, water-and foam-soaked building never leaves you.

Bandwidth is troubling, because it’s just one of many phrases that assume we are mere cogs in the machine Allow me to totter onto my rickety soapbox for a second, and say: business jargon has gone too far. Buzzwords have become so entrenched into working life that they have, in effect, become a second language. One that, like a much-needed laxative, we are forced to digest to keep daily operations running smoothly. If you don’t use (or at least nod energetically along with) phrases like ‘low-hanging fruit’ or suggest that someone ‘circle back’ so that you can ‘create synergy’, and instead choose to communicate like an unlobotomised person, you’ll find yourself a virtual pariah.

You won’t find Charlie Thompson amongst the pages of Debrett’s Peerage, unless you look especially hard. Thanks to ChatGPT, though, inquisitive researchers can stumble on his name (though inconspicuous enough) bracketed with illustrious, even aristocratic families. His ancestry is not his fault, as he frequently tells himself. Just because a great-grandmother was an Earl's daughter doesn't make him a toff. Even so, he lives in perpetual anxiety of being found out.   His colleagues at the large media firm, where he’s worked for 20 years, spend more time bashing ‘posh twats’ and ‘nepo babies’ than he’s entirely comfortable with.

Eclipse chasing is a bizarre hobby, since there is no mystery regarding the whereabouts of the quarry. The date, time, and place for the one this week has been known about for centuries. That didn’t stop busloads of self-pronounced eclipse chasers descending on the small Spanish resort of Peniscola, however. As the day approached, the overriding emotion was relief that we all weren’t in Iceland, (with Spain, the other main site for totality), which was predicted to have a particularly poor day, weatherwise. Clouds are a fatal impediment for a total eclipse.   ‘Look at the forecast for Reykjavik,’ said Steve Moss with unalloyed schadenfreude.

 For decades, I calculated my annual tax return using the same method; as dull and reliable as a shire horse. Over a few consecutive days, mired in files of receipts, I would transcribe all the info into a spreadsheet, which would then whizz off to my accountants (to whom I pay a vast sum for pressing SEND and passing this on to the Tax Man). Sure, this doesn’t count among my most welcome annual events. It’s not even in the top 100. But at least it only happened once a year.  Non-compliance - even anarchy - is looking a better bet than this absolute horror show Now, Making Tax Digital has arrived, a visitor as unwelcome as a Nazgûl. Like many things, the blame for this can be squarely laid at the polished brogues of George Osborne.

For generations we relied on the good old flat-capped honesty of the onion. It was unpretentious, predictable and perfectly content to hide in a bag at the dark recesses of kitchen cupboards until dragged out, to be chopped into the bottom of a mince or fried into submission as the ‘healthy’ garnish in a bapped burger. Onions knew their place.    But over the last few months, an allium armada has breached our shores. An aggressive amphibious landing has invaded Middle England’s supermarkets and thus the showier parts of my kitchen units. These are shallots: small pink immigrants arriving in vast, unstoppable numbers.

Nobody can deny that Pippa is a campaigner.  Her friends say it, her children complain about it, even her opponents - she tries very hard not to call them her enemies (in public) - say it.  The leaflets with Liberal Democrats on the front say it; the newspapers with Liberal Democrats in tiny letters on the back say it. Curiously, none of them ever mention what she campaigns for, or whether any of these campaigns have ever been successful - but that is really beside the point.  Ten years ago, she was campaigning against Brexit.  (She might have had more of an impact had she campaigned before the referendum, but that is also beside the point.

In the interests of complete candour, I should reveal that Dawn French and I have had ‘beef’ (and how suitable that word is, as we were both beefy at the time) for decades. Since 1994, to be precise, when she made a television documentary on ‘Big Women’. She asked me to appear in it; I refused; she put my name repeatedly on the credits. What a way to celebrate porkers - by calling someone a porker!   I was merely chubby at the time, being a good 5’9 in my prime (I’ve shrunk a bit with age and disability) whereas she was only 5 foot and maybe 19 stone at her ‘peak’.

By rights, the 33-year-old singer-songwriter and actress Ariana Grande should be at the peak of her profession. She won acclaim for her performances in the Wicked films – the first one of which she was Oscar-nominated for – and has consistently released successful albums, including last week’s new record petal. Under normal circumstances she would be looking forward to continuing her world tour, Eternal Sunshine. And next year, she was slated to make her London stage debut opposite her Wicked co-star Jonathan Bailey in Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday In The Park With George. There is, however, one rather significant issue with this, which has been discussed in the media with a mixture of prurience and genuine concern.